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UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 

LIBRARY 

COLLEGE  OF  AGRICULTURE 
DAVIS,  CALIFORNIA 


it; 


Memories   of  a   Hundred   Years 


EDWARD  EVERETT  HALE. 


Memories  of  a  Hundred 
Years 


BY 


EDWARD    EVERETT    HALE 

n\ 

AUTHOR   OF   "THE   MAN   WITHOUT  A   COUNTRY,"   ETC. 


TWO    VOLUMES    IN    ONE 


New  Edition,  Revised,  with  Three  Additional  Chapters 


gorfe 
THE    MACMILLAN    COMPANY 

LONDON:   MACMILLAN   &  CO.,  LTD. 
1904 


All  rights  reserved 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 

LIBRARY 

COLLEGfi  OF  AGRICULTURE 
DAVIS 


\3 


COPYRIGHT,  1902  AND  1904, 
BY  THE   MACMILLAN  COMPANY. 

Set  up  and  electrotyped.  Published  November,  1902.  Reprinted 
January,  1903. 

New  edition,  revised,  in  one  volume,  with  three  additional  chapters, 
published  October,  1904. 


NoriaooD 

J.  S.  Cashing  &  Co.  —  Berwick  &  Smith  Co. 
Norwood,  Mass.,  U.S.A. 


PREFACE 

I  LIVE  in  a  large,  old-fashioned  house  which 
is  crowded  from  cellar  to  attic  with  letters  and 
other  manuscripts,  with  pamphlets,  and  with 
newspapers.  Here  are  the  diaries  and  corre 
spondence  of  my  own  generation,  of  my  father's 
and  mother's,  and  of  their  fathers'  and  mothers'. 
Boxes,  drawers,  cabinets,  secretaries,  closets,  full 
of  "your  uncle's  papers,"  or  "your  grand 
father's,"  or  his. 

Only  the  most  gracious  of  house-mothers 
would  tolerate  such  stores. 

And  I  have  inherited  the  passion  for  history. 
My  father  was  a  great  journalist.  He  loved 
to  study  history  in  the  original  documents. 
Boston  Stamp  Act  ?  Here  are  the  pamphlets. 
President  Adams's  private  advice  to  Alexander 
Everett  ?  Here  it  is.  Mr.  Webster's  current 
opinions  on  the  tariff?  Here  they  are.  Do 
you  wonder,  dear  reader,  that  when  the  hearers 
are  amiable,  your  old  friend  who  writes  these 


iv  PREFACE 

words,  now  in  his  eightieth  year,  is  apt  to 
prophesy  or  to  chatter  about  the  history  of  his 
own  generation  and  the  generation  before  his 
own  as  he  saw  it  through  his  own  keyholes  ? 

His  friends  and  yours  of  The  Outlook  have 
met  him  more  than  half-way  in  such  habits  of 
his.  And  it  is  so  that  you  see  these  "  memories 
of  a  hundred  years." 

39  HIGHLAND  STREET,  ROXBURY, 
September  1,  1901. 


WITH  the  preface  above  I  introduced  to  the 
readers  of  The  Outlook  magazine  a  series  of 
fourteen  chapters,  which  have  been  printed  in 
that  journal  in  the  last  year.  Many  kind  cor 
respondents  have  furnished  memoranda  for  the 
correction  and  the  enlargement  of  those  papers. 

To  the  preface  of  the  first  edition  of  this 
book  I  may  now  add  a  few  words.  The  Mem 
ories  here  published  interested  a  much  wider 
range  of  readers  than  I  had  supposed  possible. 
What  is  called  our  reading  public  does  not  take 
much  interest  in  the  history  of  America.  But 
the  people  who  are  interested,  are  interested 
"  with  a  vengeance."  I  have,  therefore,  received 


PREFACE  v 

many,  many  interesting  letters  from  such  read 
ers,  some  on  details  comparatively  unimportant, 
some  on  the  great  turning  crises  of  history. 
From  these  letters  I  have  been  able  to  make, 
in  this  new  edition,  some  additions  and  some 
corrections  to  the  papers  heretofore  published. 

Some  readers,  perhaps  over  critical,  have 
ventured  to  say,  "  Who  is  this  man  who  airs 
his  reminiscences  after  the  century  closes  ? " 
And  at  the  solicitation  of  such  friends  I  now 
add  to  the  book,  as  originally  published,  some 
supplementary  chapters.  All  autobiography  re 
quires  an  apology.  Saint  Paul's  admirable  in 
junction,  "  Let  no  man  think  of  himself  more 
highly  than  he  ought  to  think,''  suggests  an 
excellent  corollary,  "  Let  no  man  think  of  him 
self  at  all."  This  is  not  a  bad  working  rule. 
In  the  Lend-a-Hand  gospel  we  abridge  it  into 
the  injunction,  "  Look  out  and  not  in." 

Still,  if  a  sentry  says  to  you,  "  Who  goes 
there?"  when  you  try  to  pass  him  at  midnight, 
it  is  safer  to  answer  than  it  is  to  receive  a 
bayonet  through  the  second  cardiac  lobe.  At 
the  intelligent  suggestion,  therefore,  of  the  pub 
lishers,  I  add  three  autobiographical  chapters. 
They  are  commended  to  the  reader  with  Abra- 


vi  PREFACE 


ham  Lincoln's  admirable  words,  which  ought  to 
be  the  centre  of  modern  criticism,  "  The  people 
will  perhaps  like  these  chapters  who  like  that 
sort  of  thing." 


EDWAKD  E.   HALE. 


MATUNUCK,  RHODE  ISLAND, 
July  20,  1904. 


CONTENTS 

VOLUME   I 
CHAPTER  I 

PAGE 

FOR  FIVE  YEARS       .  1 

CHAPTER   II 
1801-1807.     FAILURES  AND  FOLLIES         ....      47 

CHAPTER   III 
THE  SMALLER  BOSTON 121 

CHAPTER  IV 
THE  VIRGINIAN  DYNASTY 177 

CHAPTER  V 
JAMES  MONROE 215 

CHAPTER   VI 
1808-1840.     THE  OTHER  SIDE  OF  THE  WATER      .        .     257 

CHAPTER  VII 
INTERNAL  IMPROVEMENT  .  289 


viii  CONTENTS 

VOLUME   II 
CHAPTER  I 

PAGE 

THE  ORATORS  —  MODERN  AMERICAN  ORATORY     .        .        1 

CHAPTER  II 
THE  HISTORIANS        .        . 43 

CHAPTER  III 
ANTISLAVERY 89 

CHAPTER  IV 
PERSONAL  — TEXAS,  KANSAS,  AND  NEBRASKA        .        .    133 

CHAPTER  V 
THE  WAR   ....        .-       .        .        .        .        .169 

CHAPTER  VI 
LITERATURE 221 

CHAPTER  VII 
A  REVIEW 265 

CHAPTER  VIII 
EIGHTY  YEARS   .        .        .        .        .        .        .        .        .    297 

CHAPTER  IX 
THE  HISTORY  OF  MAGAZINES  .        .        .        ,        .        .    327 

CHAPTER  X 
Now  AND  THEN  345 


ILLUSTRATIONS 
VOLUME   I 

Edward  Everett  Hale  .         .  Photogravure  Frontispiece 

Drawn  by  Alfred  Houghton  Clark. 

"AGE 

Nathan  Hale  (of  the  Revolution)        .....         6 

An  etching  by  S.  Hollyer. 
The  First  Cotton-gin 7 

John  Marshall 9 

From  the  portrait  by  Jarvis,  owned  by  the  late  Justice  Gray. 

Eli  Whitney's  Letter  to  the  State  of  Tennessee  on  the 

Advantages  of  the  Cotton-gin     .....       13 

From  the  original,  owned  by  the  Hon.  Eli  Whitney  of  New 
Haven. 

Robert  R  Livingston  ........       17 

From  an  engraving  by  H.  B.  Hall. 
The  First  Trip  of  the  Clermont,  September,  1807  .  .  19 

From  a  drawing  by  J.  H.  Sherwin. 
Robert  Fulton 22 

From  an  engraving  by  H.  B.  Hall,  Jr.,  after  the  portrait  by 
B.  West. 

Napoleon 25 

From  the  etching  by  J.  David  after  the  portrait  by  L.  David. 
Thomas  Jefferson         .         .         .         .         ,         ,         .  31 

After  a  French  portrait  of  1829. 
Eli  Whitney         .........       38 

An  engraving  after  the  portrait  by  C.  B.  King. 


ILLUSTRATIONS 


PAGE 


Philip  Nolan's  Signature     .         .        .        .»:_-..      52 

Affixed  to  a  receipt  of  merchandise,  September  28,  1795. 
From  the  original  in  the  possession  of  the  author. 

General  James  Wilkinson,  Philip  Nolan's  Partner     .        .      54 

From  an  etching  by  Max  Rosenthal  after  the  portrait  by 
C.  W.  Peale. 

General  William  Eaton 59 

Engraving  by  Hamlin. 

General  William  Eaton  and  Hamet  Caramelli  ...      60 
On  the  Desert  of  Barca,  approaching  Derne. 

Aaron  Burr          „        .        ...        ...        .        .86 

From  the  portrait  by  Gilbert  Stuart. 

A  Letter  from  Jefferson  to  Aaron  Burr      ....       89 

From  the  original,  owned  by  the  American  Antiquarian  So 
ciety. 

Josiah  Quincy      .        .        , 94 

After  the  portrait  by  Stuart. 
The  Quincy  Mansion  at  Quincy 96 

From  an  early  woodcut. 

Williams  College  as  it  appeared  when  Nathan  Hale  was 

a  Student  there  .         .        .        .        .        .        .        .     103 

From  a  painting  in  the  possession  of  Williams  College. 

Phillips-Exeter  Academy,  where  Nathan  Hale  taught  in 

1805     .        .        .         .      '  .        .        .        .        .        .109 

Built  in  1794.    The  wings  were  added  in  1822. 

Dr.  Oliver  Peabody  of  Exeter     .        .        .        .        .        .     110 

From  an  early  miniature. 
Letter  of  Edward  Everett  .        .        ...        .     112,  113 

The  Boston  Weekly  Messenger     .        .        .        .        .        .115 

Published  by  Nathan  Hale  in  1820. 
Daniel  Webster  .        .        .        .       ,.        .        ,        .        .119 

After  the  portrait  by  R.  M.  Staigg. 


ILLUSTRATIONS  xi 


PAGK 


James  Bowdoin 124 

After  the  miniature  by  J.  H.  Daniels. 

Beacon  Street  a  hundred  years  ago 125 

Boston  Customhouse 126 

Old  State  House 127 

East  View  of  Faneuil  Hall  Market 128 

Faneuil  Hall 129 

Boston  and  Worcester  Railway 131 

From  an  old  print. 

The  Old  State  House 133 

From  a  picture  owned  by  the  Massachusetts  Historical  Society. 

Lafayette's  Visit  to  Boston 136 

From  an  old  print. 
Lafayette 137 

From  a  colored  print. 
John  Stark 150 

From  the  painting  by  U.  V.  Tenney  after  the  Trumbull  por 
trait. 

George  Washington     .         .         .         .         .         .         .         .159 

From  a  stipple  engraving  after  the  Houdon  bust. 
Ms.  Letter  of  George  Washington 163 

Mary  Philipse       .........     166 

From  an  engraving  by  J.  Rogers. 

The    Bulletin   issued   on  the    Occasion   of  Washington's 

Entrance  into  Boston  in  1789 171 

Thomas  Jefferson         ........     179 

After  a  painting  by  Bouch. 

James  Madison    .         .         .         .         .         .         .        .         .186 

After  the  portrait  by  Gilbert  Stuart. 

Major-general  Henry  Dearborn   ....         ,  194 

From  an  original  etching  by  H.  B.  Hall. 


xii  ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

The  Capture  of  the  Guerriere  by  the  Constitution       .        .     196 

From  an  engraving  by  Samuel  Walker  after  the  drawing  by 
T.  Birch. 

Commodore  James  Richard  Dacres 197 

Engraved  from  the  portrait  by  Bowyer. 

American  Naval  Commanders  of  the  War  of  1812 : 

A.  William  Bainbridge        .        ...        .        .     197 

Portrait  by  J.  W.  Darvis. 

B.  Isaac  Hull       .        ._»....        .198 

From  an  engraving  after  the  original  portrait  by 
Gilbert  Stuart. 

C.  Stephen  Decatur     .        .        .        .        .        .        .     199 

Portrait  by  Gilbert  Stuart. 

D.  Commodore  Rodgers 199 

Portrait  by  Henry  Williams. 

E.  James  Lawrence 206 

Portrait  by  Gilbert  Stuart. 

The  Guerriere  Ballad 201 

From  an  original  in  the  possession  of  the  author. 

Captain  Sir  Philip  Bowes  Vere  Broke         .        ...     212. 
From  an  engraving  by  W.  Greatbatch. 

James  Monroe 218 

From  the  portrait  by  Vanderlyn. 

Governor  De  Witt  Clinton 226 

Engraved  from  the  bust  by  A.  B.  Durand. 

John  Quincy  Adams    .        .        ...        .        .        .     235 

After  an  engraving  from  the  portrait  by  A.  B.  Durand. 

William  Harris  Crawford    .      *..'.:'.        .        .        .    236 
Engraved  by  S.  H.  Gimber  from  a  painting  by  J.  W.  Darvis. 

John  Cald well  Calhoun       .        .        .        .        .        .        .    237 

From  a  miniature  by  Blanchard. 

Henry  Clay  as  a  Young  Man      .        .        .        *        .        .     243 


ILLUSTRATIONS  xiii 


PAGE 


George  Canning 247 

From  a  sketch  made  iu  the  House  of  Commons,  March,  1826. 

Alexander  Hill  Everett .         .252 

From  an  sarly  miniature. 

The  Everett  House  at  Dorchester 255 

Emperor  Alexander  I 259 

From  an  engraving  by  Montaut. 

Samuel  Taylor  Coleridge 262 

From  an  engraving  of  1809. 

AbelFullum 266 

Drawn  by  Ellen  D.  Hale. 

The  New  England  Primer 268 

From  the  collection  of  W.  G.  Bowdoin,  Esq. 

General  Andrew  Jackson 271 

From  a  rare  print  by  F.  Cardon. 

The  Hermitage 272 

Martin  Van  Buren 281 

After  a  miniature  by  Mrs.  Bogardus. 

A  View  of    Boston,  showing  the    Providence    and   the 

Worcester  Railways   .......     292 

From  an  early  drawing. 
New  York  Canal  Celebration,  November  4,  1825        .         .    295 

Illumination  of  the  New  York  City  Hall  during  the  Grand 

Canal  Celebration 297 

James  Sullivan,  President  of  the  Middlesex  Canal  Com 
pany    300 

After  the  portrait  by  Gilbert  Stuart. 
Colonel  Loammi  Baldwin    .......     301 

From  a  silhouette.    The  only  known  portrait  from  life. 
The  Falls  in  the  Merrimack  at  Chelmsford         .         .         .302 

From  a  painting  by  an  English  artist. 


xiv  ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGB 

The  Susquehanna  at  Liverpool,  Pa.,  showing  the  Pennsyl 
vania  Canal .        .    304 

A  comparison  of  the  two  modes  of  carrying  freight. 
The  Pioneer  Line  Station  at  Lancaster,  Pa.       .        .        .     312 

An  Advertisement  of  the  Express  Line  between  Lancaster, 

Philadelphia,  and  Pittsburg 314 

From  a  newspaper  of  1837. 

The  Erie  Canal 316 

Part  of  a  Letter  written  by  De  Witt  Clinton  in  1817         .     318 


VOLUME   II 

Edward  Everett  Hale  ......        Frontispiece 

Drawn  by  Alfred  Houghton  Clark. 
Edward  Everett 10 

From  a  daguerreotype. 

A  Letter  from   Daniel  Webster  to  Nathan   Hale   (Dr. 

Hale's  Father)     .         .        .        ...        .        .        .18 

From  the  original  owned  by  Dr.  Hale. 
Daniel  Webster .        .         .27 

From  a  daguerreotype. 
John  Gorham  Palfrey .49 

From  a  painting  by  Rembrandt  Peale. 
Bust  of  Jared  Sparks 53 

George  Bancroft .........       55 

After  a  photograph  by  Fredricks. 
Richard  Hildreth         .        .         .        .        .        .        .        .67 

William  H.  Prescott 69 

From  a  stipple  engraving. 
Prescott's  Home  at  Pepperell,  Mass 71 

From  an  engraving  by  J.  Kirk. 


ILLUSTRATIONS  xv 

PAGE 

Washington  Irving      ........       73 

Painted  by  D.  Wilkie  at  Seville,  April  23,  1828. 
The  First  Home  of  the  Massachusetts  Historical  Society  .       87 

From  an  early  photograph. 
William  Lloyd  Garrison  and  Wendell  Phillips  ...       92 

William  Ellery  Channing 97 

From  the  portrait  by  Gambardella,  owned  by  Miss  Channing. 
Theodore  Parker's  Placard 101 

Placard  written  by  Theodore  Parker  and  printed  and  posted 
by  the  Vigilance  Committee  of  Boston  after  the  rendition 
of  Thomas  Sims  to  slavery  in  April,  1851. 

Harriet  Beecher  Stowe         .......     106 

Edmund  Quincy  .........     114 

A  Pro-slavery  Handbill 116 

This  was  printed  at  the  office  of  the  Boston  Commercial 
Gazette,  under  the  direction  of  the  proprietor,  James  L. 
Homer,  on  the  21st  of  October,  1835,  and  was  directed 
against  George  Thompson,  who  was  then  causing  great 
excitement  by  his  eloquent  addresses  against  slavery.  The 
poster  was  set  up  and  run  off  on  a  hand-press  by  two  ap 
prentices  of  Homer,  one  of  whom  was  George  C.  Rand, 
subsequently  a  master  printer  of  Boston  and  the  first 
printer  of  "  Uncle  Tom's  Cabin."  These  two  boys  then 
distributed  them  among  the  bar-rooms  and  barber-shops 
of  the  business  section  of  the  city,  with  the  result  that  by 
two  o'clock  a  raging  mob  of  five  thousand  people  gathered 
about  the  antislavery  office,  and  shortly  after  laid  violent 
hands  upon  Mr.  Garrison,  in  the  absence  of  Mr.  Thompson, 
who  was  out  of  the  city. 

A  Letter  from  Theodore  Parker  on  the  Antislavery  Enter 
prise.     Dated  Sept.  10,  1855 117 

Theodore  Parker's  Grave 119 

Charles  Sumner   .........     161 

From  an  engraving  by  Augustus  Robin. 
Abraham  Lincoln 172 

After  a  photograph  by  M.  B.  Brady. 


xvi  ILLUSTRATIONS 

PACK 

Ulysses  S.  Grant.        .        ,        „        .       Y    -  ;„'        ,        .     183 
Stoughton  Hall,  Harvard  College        .        .        .         .         .     225 
Built  after  Old  Stoughton  was  burned  down  in  1775. 

Five  Presidents  of   Harvard  College:    Quincy,  Everett, 

Walker,  Sparks,  Felton       .         .         .         .       V       .     229 

Ralph  Waldo  Emerson        .        .        .        ...        .        .     231 

From  a  painting  by  Alfred  E.  Smith,  after  an  old  daguerreo 
type.    Copyright  by  Foster  Brothers,  Boston. 

Longfellow  and  Sumner      .        .        .        ....     241 

Abiel  Smith          .        ....        .        .        .        .     244 

Founder  of  the  Smith  Professorship  of  Modern  Languages  at 
Harvard  College. 

Oliver  Wendell  Holmes     -  ...        ....    , .  •      .        .    248 

From  a  photograph  taken  in  1862. 

James  Russell  Lowell,  John  Holmes,  Estes  Howe,  and 

Robert  Carter,  at  a  Game  of  Whist   ....     255 
Photographed  by  Black  in  1859. 

A  Page  from  the  Valedictory  Exercises  of  Lowell's  Class 

at  Harvard .         .         .      -  .        v.        .*       ^        .         .     257 

Judge  Lowell        .        .        .        .     .  .        .        .        .        .  260 

Edward  Everett  Hale  as  a  Young  Man      .      /.        .        .  299 

From  an  early  portrait.    Copyright  by  the  S.  S.  McClure  Co. 

Nathan  Hale,  Jr.,  as  a  Young  Man 305 

Edward  Everett  Hale  in  1846     ...        .        .        .  313 

From  the  painting  by  Richard  Hinsdele. 

Church  at  Worcester,  Mass.,  at  which  Dr.  Hale  officiated 

in  1846        .        .        . 317 

Eli  Thayer  .        .        ...        .        .       ,.        .  .  321 

Amos  Lawrence  .        .        ...        .                .        ,  .  323 

George  Rex  Graham,  Editor  of  Graham's  Magazine  .  .  334 

John  Sartain,  Editor  of  Sartain's  Magazine        .        -.  ,     .  339 


ILLUSTRATIONS  xvii 

PAGE 

Moses  Dresser  Phillips 341 

Reproduced  by  permission  of  Houghton,  Mifflin  &  Co. 

Capitol,  Washington,  1844 .     348 

Railway  Train  in  the  Mohawk  Valley,  1844       .        .        .352 

Trenton  Falls 360 

From  an  old  print. 
Susquehanna  Canal  and  Boats,  1844 368 


FOR   FIVE   YEARS 


VOL.    I. — 


MEMOEIES  OF  A  HUNDRED  TEARS 

CHAPTER  I 

FOB,  FIVE  YEAES 

NO !  I  am  not  as  old  as  the  century.  A 
dear  little  Italian  girl  at  Miss  Noyes's 
Kindergarten  asked  me  the  other  day  if  I  were 
George  Washington.  I  was  flattered.  I  was 
pleased,  as  we  are  always  pleased  by  flattery. 
But  I  had  to  confess  that  I  was  not  "  the  father 
of  his  country."  She  seemed  relieved.  She  sim 
ply  said,  "He  was  very  white,"  with  an  emphasis 
on  the  "he"  and  the  "very,"  and  we  changed 
the  conversation. 

All  the  same,  that  year  1801  stands  out  in  the 
family  record  here  with  a  very  bright  vermilion 
mark.  For  it  was  on  an  autumn  day  in  the  year 
1800  that  my  father  was  at  work  in  his  father's 
garden  in  Westhampton,  Mass.  I  should  say  he 
was  digging  potatoes,  if  I  dared  rely  on  a  memory 
of  iron  which  seldom  deceives  me.  And  the 
family  tradition  says  he  was  digging  potatoes. 
But  modern  historical  realism  requires  stern  ac- 

3 


4  MEMORIES   OF   A  HUNDRED   YEARS 

curacy,  and  I  will  not  swear.  Anyway,  he  was 
at  work  in  the  garden. 

His  father,  my  grandfather,  Enoch  Hale, 
suddenly  called  him  into  the  house,  and  told 
him  that  he  was  called  that  he  might  see 
Tutor  Gould.  I  have  no  doubt  that  the  boy 
washed  his  hands  in  the  perennial  spring 
which  still  flows  in  the  woodshed  behind  the 
kitchen,  and,  with  this  immediate  preparation 
only,  joined  the  two  ministers  in  his  father's 
study. 

The  boy  was  sixteen  years  old  on  the  16th  of 
August,  which  had  recently  passed. 

Of  the  two  ministers  whom  he  met  in  the 
study,  one  was  Enoch  Hale,  who  had  been  min 
ister  at  Westhampton  since  1777,  and  who  died 
in  that  charge  in  1837.  The  other  was  the  Eev. 
Vinson  Gould,  remembered  by  Williams  College 
men  as  one  of  their  early  tutors.  Williams  Col 
lege,  in  the  northwestern  township  of  Massachu 
setts,  had  been  chartered  by  the  General  Court 
of  that  State  in  the  year  1793.  It  was  founded 
to  carry  out  a  bequest  from  Colonel  Ephraim 
Williams,  a  frontier  colonel  in  the  "  French 
War,"  At  the  moment  I  am  trying  to  describe, 
Tutor  Gould  was  engaged  in  recruiting  for  the 
College,  and  picking  up  pupils  here  and  there. 


FOR  FIVE   YEARS  5 

Here  is  the  brief  account  of  his  arrival  in  the 
Rev.  Enoch  Hale's  Journal :  — 

"  Oct.  6,  1800.  Showery  morning.  Kill  sheep. 
Mr.  Vinson  Gould,  candidate  and  tutor  at  Will 
iams  College,  dines  here.  Examines  Nathan  and 
admits  him  a  member  of  Williams  College.  Mr. 
T.  Wood  also  dines.  He  last  night  at  Mr.  J.  S. 
Parsons.  Afternoon  ride  Mr.  E.  Rust.  His  child 
sick." 

They  told  the  boy  that  he  was  to  be  examined 
in  Greek  and  Latin,  that  Mr.  Gould  might  judge 
whether  he  were  fit  to  enter  Williams  College  at 
the  next  term.  One  pauses  to  consider  how  sat 
isfactory  to  the  pupil  was  this  system  of  ex 
amination.  One  imagines  President  Low  and 
President  Eliot  in  this  summer  of  1901  riding  on 
horseback  from  town  to  town  to  examine  their 
future  students  in  Greek  and  Latin  at  their 
homes.  How  much  of  the  misery  of  modern 
examinations  must  have  been  saved  to  our 
fathers  and  our  grandfathers !  The  boy  read 
his  Greek  Testament  to  the  satisfaction  of  both 
his  examiners.  He  read  such  scraps  of  Latin  as 
they  gave  him  to  their  equal  satisfaction.  Mr. 
Gould  expressed  his  pleasure,  and  said  that  the 
boy  was  quite  prepared  for  the  college  course. 


MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 


My  grandmother  gave  them  all  their  dinner, 
which  you  may  be  sure  was  daintily  served,  and 
Tutor  Gould  mounted  his  horse  again  arid  pro 
ceeded  on  his  way.  I 
like  to  begin  these  mem 
ories  with  that  story, 
because  once  for  all  it 
compares  the  simplicity 
of  those  days  with  the 
clatter  and  creaking, 
with  the  fuss  and  feath 
ers,  of  to-day.  And  let 
me  say,  as  we  pass  on, 
that  I  think  the  Latin 
and  the  Greek  had  been 
well  taught  and  well 
learned.  The  teach 
er  was  my  grand 
father,  who  had 
learned  his  Latin 
and  Greek  at  Yale 
College  with  his 
brother  and  class 
mate  Nathan  Hale, 
the  same  whose  statue  stands  by  Broadway  to 
day.  How  much  of  my  father's  Latin  and  Greek 
he  learned  at  Williamstown  I  cannot  say,  but, 


NATHAN  HALE. 
From  an  etching  by  S.  Hollyer. 


LOUISIANA 


as  a  man,  he  read  both  languages  easily  and 
with  pleasure.  He  kept  up  his  acquaintance 
with  both  until  he  died. 

LOUISIANA 

The  boy  who  was  digging  potatoes  in  October, 
1800,  graduated  at  Williams  College  in  the 
summer  of  1804.  In  the  four  years  between  a 
great  deal  was  going  on  in  this  world.  On  the 
other  side  of  the  ocean,  Napoleon  made  peace 
with  Great  Britain.  The  peace  lasted  for  a  year 
and  a  half,  and  then  the  English  Ministry  forced 
him  into  war  again.  Meanwhile  he  sold  Loui 
siana  to  the  United  States  —  almost  half  of 
our  present  domain, 
everything  which 
we  hold  between 
the  Mississippi  and 
the  crest  of  the 
Rocky  Mountains. 

In  the  same  years, 
Fulton  was  building 
his  first  steamboat, 
and  without  the 
steamboat  little  use  had  we  for  the  Mississippi 
Valley.  In  the  same  years,  Eli  Whitney's 
cotton-gin  begins  to  teach  men  how  cotton 


THE  FIRST  COTTON-GIN. 


8  MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

is  to  be  king.  In  the  same  years,  Thomas 
Jefferson  is  learning  what  a  nation  is,  and 
John  Marshall  is  teaching  all  America,  what 
till  now  America  does  not  know,  that  the 
United  States  IS  a  Nation.  Even  Jefferson 
had  thought  that  the  United  States  were  a 
Confederacy. 

To  speak  of  one  detail  in  this  four  years' 
history,  on  the  22d  day  of  March,  1801,  Philip 
Nolan,  the  first  explorer  of  Texas,  was  killed  at 
Waco,  in  Texas,  by  one  Spanish  official,  while 
he  was  acting  under  the  orders  of  another. 
For  this  atrocity  and  others  which  preceded 
it  and  others  which  followed  in  its  train, 
the  people  of  the  Mississippi  Valley  never 
forgave  Spain ;  and  we  have  seen  the  result 
in  our  own  time. 

While  such  seeds  were  planted  in  one  hemi 
sphere  or  another,  the  Westhampton  boy,  glad 
to  be  released  from  the  care  of  the  potatoes,  was 
perfecting  his  Latin  and  Greek  at  Williams 
College.  He  studied  Hebrew  also.  I  asked  him 
once  why  he  did  this.  He  laughed  and  said, 
"  Because  there  was  nothing  else  to  study."  But 
this  was  not  literally  true.  The  mathematical 
course  was  thorough,  and  led  him  through 
studies  which  delighted  him.  For  his  work  in 


JOHN    MARSHALL. 
From  the  portrait  by  Jarvis,  owned  by  Justice  Gray. 


LOUISIANA  11 

internal  improvements  as  an  accomplished  civil 
engineer,  Williams  College  gave  him  good  prepara 
tion,  and  the  French  language  was  taught  there. 

He  thoroughly  enjoyed  his  college  life.  He 
was  so  accurate  in  after  life  as  a  classical  scholar 
and  as  a  mathematician  that  I  am  sure  he  must 
have  used  his  time  well. 

The  students  had  already  divided  themselves 
into  the  Philotechnian  and  Philologian  Societies. 
It  has  pleased  me,  in  these  later  years,  to  think 
that,  as  he  became  so  distinguished  a  craftsman 
in  the  great  enterprises  by  which  men  control 
nature,  he  should  have  been  ranked  among  the 
Philotechnians  or  artificers.  But  this  may  have 
been  an  accident. 

They  still  preserve  in  the  College  Library  the 
old  record-book  of  the  Philotechnian.  It  was 
while  he  was  Secretary  that  Livingston  in  Paris 
bought  Louisiana  for  the  country.  "  I  have 
given  England  her  rival,"  said  Napoleon,  and 
we  have  to  confess  that  it  was  to  Napoleon's 
foresight  that  we  owe  that  purchase  and  all 
which  has  followed  it.  Jefferson  was  badly 
frightened,  but  had  to  accept  the  present.  The 
New  England  Federalists  detested  the  whole 
business.  And  these  boys  of  the  Philotechnian, 
sons  of  Federalist  fathers,  put  themselves  on 


12          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

record.      Here   is   the   minute   of   the  meeting 
which  debated  the 

"  Question.     Is  the  purchase  of  Louisiana  de 
sirable  ?      Decided   in   the  negative :    fifteen  to 


one." 


The  New  England  States  hated  the  whole 
business  because  they  supposed  that  the  emigra 
tion  would  strip  them  of  their  population.  Lit 
tle  did  Massachusetts  think  then  that  the  time 
would  come  when  she  would  pay  in  that  region 
for  her  breadstuffs  with  her  fish  and  lobsters  as 
she  does  now. 

But,  alas !  you  can  look  through  the  records 
of  the  young  craftsmen  of  the  Philotechnian  and 
find  no  reference  to  Eli  Whitney's  cotton-gin  or 
to  Robert  Fulton's  steamboat,  two  inventions 
already  at  work  which  were  to  revolutionize 
their  land.  Had  any  prophet  told  them  this, 
they  would  have  said  he  was  a  fool. 

Yet,  indeed,  without  the  steamboat,  of  what 
use  was  Louisiana  ?  Without  it  Lewis  and 
Clark  were  eighteen  months  in  1804  and  1805 
in  going  from  St.  Louis  to  the  Pacific,  and  eight 
months  in  1806  in  coming  back.  They  did  not 
know  it,  but  a  year  before  they  left  St.  Louis  the 
two  Roberts,  Fulton  and  Livingston,  were  build- 


ELI  WHITNEY'S  LETTER  TO  THE  STATE  OF  TENNESSEE  ON 
THE  ADVANTAGES  OF  THE  COTTON-GIN. 

From  the  original,  owned  by  the  Hon.  Eli  Whitney,  of  New  Haven, 
and  here  reproduced  for  the  first  time. 


LOUISIANA  15 

ing  the  steamboat  which,  before  the  summer  was 
over,  was  sailing  on  the  Seine,  at  Paris.  I  do 
not  believe  that  one  of  the  Philotechnian  boys 
had  ever  heard  of  Eli  Whitney,  though  he  was 
of  their  own  State.  He  was  from  the  eastern 
half  of  their  State,  of  which  they  did  not  know 
much.  Yet  his  machine  had  been  eight  years  at 
work,  as  at  least  twenty-five  thousand  bales  of 
cotton  were  exported  in  that  year.  But,  from 
Jefferson  down,  not  a  man,  except  Whitney,  per 
haps,  foresaw  the  ascendency  which  the  cotton- 
gin  was  to  give  to  the  Southern  country,  and 
that  while  they  still  lived  King  Cotton  was  to  be 
ruling  with  a  sceptre  harder  than  iron.  As  late 
as  1795,  in  the  negotiations  for  Jay's  treaty,  no 
body  alluded  to  cotton  as  a  possible  article  of 
export  from  America.  Eight  years  afterward, 
while  the  boys  were  discussing  the  Louisiana 
treaty,  Slater  w^as  weaving  cotton  in  Pawtucket 
in  Rhode  Island,  and  the  Cabots  in  Beverly  in 
Massachusetts.  But  I  doubt  if  any  of  the  Philo- 
technians  knew  that.  No  !  they  were  all  dressed 
in  homely  clothes  of  homespun  cloth,  cotton 
and  woollen,  woven  in  most  cases  on  their 
mothers'  looms. 


16          MEMORIES   OF   A  HUNDRED   YEARS 

THE  FOUB  GREAT   BUILDERS 

As  late  in  the  century  as  1792  the  Abbe  Genty, 
in  France,  had  written  a  prize  essay  on  the  ques 
tion  whether  the  discovery  of  America  by  Co- 
lumbus  had  been  of  more  good  or  evil  to  the 
world.  I  think  that  the  general  opinion  of 
people  who  thought  about  the  matter  at  all  was 
that  the  discovery  had  done  more  harm  than 
good.  The  Abbe  Genty  took  the  other  side. 
In  his  argument  he  had  to  put  forward,  with  as 
much  spirit  as  he  could  command,  the  possible 
contribution  which  the  United  States,  a  nation 
then  three  years  old,  would  make  to  the  world. 

Before  twenty  years  were  over  many  of  his 
prophecies  were  fulfilled.  And  for  the  visible 
changes  in  that  time  we  are  indebted  to  four 
men  —  whom  one  might  call  the  Four  Founders. 

Two  of  them  are  men  whose  names  were  on 
the  lips  of  people  who  then  talked  about  history ; 
they  were  Napoleon  Bonaparte  and  Robert  Liv 
ingston.  The  other  two  were  Eli  Whitney  and 
Robert  Fulton. 

It  is  worth  observation  that  the  three  Ameri 
cans  were  not  the  men  who  thought  they  were 
the  leaders,  or  who  made  most  figure  in  the 
journals.  Thomas  Jefferson,  Aaron  Burr,  Fisher 


THE   FOUR   GREAT    BUILDERS 


17 


Ames,  John  Bid  well,  Tristam  Burges,  for  in 
stances,  made  a  good  deal  of  noise  in  the  news 
papers.  Jefferson  was  President  and  Burr  was 
Vice-President.  But  Jefferson  did  nothing 
which  made 
the  feeble  Na 
tion  strong ; 
Burr  was  in 
exile  in  less 
than  four  years 
from  the  time 
when  he  was 
Vice-President. 
And  the  reader 
wonders  why 
I  name  the 
others. 

I  do  so  be 
cause  when  Bidwell  and  Burges  spoke  in  the 
House  of  Eepresentatives  the  Senate  could  not 
hold  a  quorum,  and  when  Ames  spoke  it  was 
thought  well  in  the  Senate  to  adjourn,  lest  men 
should  vote  on  their  side  too  precipitately.  It 
is  such  men  as  they  who  fill  the  newspapers 
of  the  day ;  yes,  and  the  private  letters  of  the 
day.  All  the  same,  such  men  did  not  make 
the  America  of  1812  or  of  1850  from  the 


ROBERT  K  LIVINGSTON. 
From  an  engraving  by  H.  B.  Hall. 


18          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

America  of  1799.  The  four  men  who  can  be 
named  as  leaders  were  the  Four  Founders  I 
have  named  above. 

Napoleon's  share  in  the  creation  of  America  is 
this.  He  instructed  Marbois,  his  Foreign  Secre 
tary,  to  offer  to  the  United  States  the  great  wil 
derness  called  Louisiana  —  the  whole  part  of  the 
valley  of  the  Mississippi  which  is  between  that 
river  and  the  Rocky  Mountains.  Robert  Living 
ston  received  the  offer  and  he  had  the  courage  to 
accept  it  —  without  orders  from  home.  To  these 
two  men  does  the  United  States  owe  half  the 
continent. 

Remember  this,  0  young  graduates  of 
1902 !  Remember  that  States  are  made  by 
makers.  Remember  that  the  Leaders  lead. 
Remember  that  it  is  not  the  gift  of  tongues 
which  makes  the  Leader.  Remember  that  the 
men  who  can,  can.  Such  men  are.  And  such 
men  do. 

An  American  shipmaster,  Robert  Gray,  had 
discovered  the  Columbia  River  and  entered  its 
mouth  in  1792.  With  this  discovery  begins  our 
claim  to  a  hold  on  the  Pacific  shore.  After  this 
the  three  great  steps  forward  are :  First,  the 
importance  of  the  cotton  crop  began  to  assert 
itself.  In  the  years  1801, 1802, 1803,  the  export 


THE   FOUR   GREAT   BUILDERS 


19 


of  cotton  from  America  to  England  was  thirty- 
three  million  pounds. 

This  increase  of  power  was  due  to  Eli  Whit 
ney,  whose  cotton-gin  had  been  patented  in  1795. 

Second  is  the  great  proposal  by  Napoleon  to 
Robert  Livingston,  made  in  Paris  in  April,  1803. 
Napoleon,  as  I  have  said,  offered  to  sell  to  the 
infant  nation  called  "  The  United  States "  all 
the  territory  between  the  Mississippi  River  and 
the  crest  of  the  Rocky  Mountains. 


THE  FIRST  TRIP  OF  THE  "  CLERMONT,"  SEPTEMBER,  1807. 
From  a  drawing  by  J.  H.  Sherwin. 

The  third  of  these  events  is  the  voyage  of  the 
Clermont  steamboat  from  New  York  to  Albany 
on  the  7th  day  of  August,  1807,  which  has 


20          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

led  to  the  opening  up  of  the  great  watercourses 
of  America,  all  but  useless  before. 

There  must  always  be  remembered  with  this 
series  the  marvellous  extension  of  the  maritime 
commerce  of  the  United  States  in  the  period  be 
tween  1790  and  1815.  No  one  person  can  be 
said  to  have  invented  this  marvellous  progress. 
There  is  no  one  person  whose  bust  can  be  placed 
in  any  hall  of  heroes  as  a  type  of  it.  What  is 
certain  is  that  Thomas  Jefferson  and  the  people 
of  his  type  did  all  they  could  to  arrest  it ;  and 
what  is  also  certain  is  that,  in  face  of  all  they 
did,  the  shipping  of  the  United  States  increased 
between  the  year  1789  and  the  year  1812  in  such 
a  proportion  that  the  United  States,  at  the  end 
of  the  Napoleonic  wars,  was  one  of  the  first 
maritime  powers. 

Given  now  these  four  miracles  —  first,  the 
appearance  of  cotton;  second,  the  doubling  of 
the  territory  of  America ;  third,  the  development 
of  steam,  especially  in  the  commerce  of  the  great 
rivers  of  the  American  continent;  and,  fourth, 
the  navigation  which  made  the  United  States  for 
twenty  years  the  carrying  power  of  the  world  — 
given  these  four  series  of  events,  and  in  their 
history  you  know  why  the  insignificant  confed 
eracy  which  the  Abbe  Genty  described  became  a 


LIVINGSTON   AND    FULTON  21 

Nation  hopeful  in  its  arts,  not  insignificant  in  its 
arms,  and  renowned  throughout  the  world  in  its 
commerce. 

It  is,  as  I  have  said,  worth  noting  that,  among 
men  who  call  themselves  statesmen,  but  who 
appear  on  the  stage  as  politicians,  Livingston  is 
the  only  one  who  contributed  in  any  impor 
tant  degree  to  these  triumphs.  You  may  read 
through  the  diaries  of  the  party  leaders  of  the 
twenty  years  between  the  invention  of  the 
cotton-gin  and  the  Treaty  of  Ghent,  and  you  will 
find  hardly  an  allusion,  in  the  writings  of  the 
politicians,  either  to  the  invention  of  the  cotton- 
gin,  the  invention  of  the  steamboat,  or  the  value 
to  the  Nation  of  the  great  rivers  of  the  West. 
On  the  other  hand,  three  out  of  four  of  them 
were  doing  their  best  to  destroy  our  commerce 
at  sea. 

LIVINGSTON  AND  FULTON 

While  Nathan  Hale  was  studying  Latin  and 
Greek  and  Hebrew,  a  revolution  impended  which 
neither  Williams  College,  nor  Thomas  Jefferson, 
nor  the  sophomore  Nathan  Hale  dreamed  of. 

Fulton's  model  steamboat  ran  upon  the 
Seine. 

In    1843  I  met  intimately  his  companion  in 


22          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

young  life,  Edward  Church,  then  an  old  man  in 

Northampton,  Mass. 

Fulton   and  he  were  room-mates  in  Paris  in 

1803.     I  think  they  both  slept  in  the  same  bed. 

I  know  that  Ful- 
ton's  model 
steamer  had  suc 
ceeded  so  well 
that  Fulton  had 
waited  on  Napo 
leon's  people 
with  his  plans 
for  steam  navi 
gation,  and  had 
been  courteously 
received.  Napo 
leon  was  already 
planning  the  ex 
pedition  against 

ROBERT  FULTON.  England.     It  had 


From  an  engraving  by  H.  B.  Hall,  Jr.,  after       foeen  planned  be- 
the  portrait  by  B.  West. 

fore    the   peace  ; 

and  this  project  for  boats  which  would  go  against 
wind  and  tide  and  could  tow  other  boats  full  of 
men  from  one  side  of  the  Channel  to  the  other 
was  just  what  he  wanted.  Church  told  me  that 
a  committee  had  been  appointed  to  examine 


LIVINGSTON   AND   FULTON  23 

Fulton's  model.  Fulton  had  prepared  every 
thing  for  the  examination  as  well  as  he  could, 
and  had  all  things  ready  for  a  show  trip.  The 
day  was  appointed  —  a  day  which  would  have 
been  a  red-letter  day  in  both  their  lives  and  in 
history. 

Alas  and  alas !  Before  that  day  dawned, 
when  both  were  in  bed,  and,  as  I  say,  I  think 
both  in  the  same  bed,  a  rat-tat-tat  at  the  door 
awaked  them.  It  was  from  a  messenger  who 
had  come  in  hot  haste  from  the  river  to  say  that 
the  weight  of  the  engine  had  caused  it  to  break 
through  the  too  fragile  barge,  and  that  the 
engine  was  at  the  bottom  of  the  Seine ! 

That  particular  experiment  never  took  place. 
The  trial  trip  was  postponed.  Observe  that  she 
had  successfully  navigated  the  river  already. 

This  is  Mr.  Church's  account,  as  I  wrote  it 
down  —  after  his  death,  as  I  am  sorry  to  say. 

(Memorandum  :  N.B.  When  you  know  any 
thing  worth  knowing  which  few  other  people 
know,  write  it  down  at  once.) 

I  have  since  verified  this  story,  and  can  supply 
the  details  almost  to  the  date.  When  Fulton 
told  the  story,  he  said  that  the  messenger's  con 
sternation  announced  that  he  bore  bad  news,  and 
that  he  exclaimed  in  French  in  accents  of  de- 


24          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

spair,  "  Oh,  sir,  the  boat  has  broken  to  pieces, 
and  has  gone  to  the  bottom."  This  was  early 
in  the  spring  of  1803.  "  An  agitation  of  the 
river  by  the  wind  "  had  broken  the  little  boat 
in  two. 

Poor  Fulton  rushed  to  the  place,  and  personally 
assisted  in  raising  boat  and  engine  from  the 
water.  He  worked  on  this  for  twenty-four  hours 
without  food, 'and  to  his  exposure  that  day  he 
attributed  afterward  much  of  his  bad  health. 
The  machinery  was  not  much  hurt,  but  they  had 
to  reconstruct  the  boat  almost  entirely.  The 
new  boat  was  sixty-six  feet  long ;  and  early  in 
August,  after  the  accident,  she  made  a  successful 
trial,  to  which  Fulton  invited  the  members  of 
the  Institute.  He  was  satisfied  with  his  success. 
But  the  first  failure,  according  to  Mr.  Church, 
chilled  the  committee  of  the  Institute,  and  Ful 
ton  found  that  he  should  have  no  encouragement 
from  Napoleon. 

All  those  experiments  were  made  with  the 
cooperation  of  Robert  R  Livingston  — "  Chan 
cellor  Livingston  "  —  the  wisest  American  of  the 
time  —  according  to  me.  He  was  our  Minister 
in  France.  Observe  now  that  on  the  30th  of 
April,  1803,  this  wise  man  bought  Louisiana 
from  Napoleon  for  fifteen  million  dollars. 


LIVINGSTON   AND   FULTON 


25 


Observe  that  on  the  12th  of  May  Lord  Whit- 
worth,  the  English  Minister,  demanded  his  pass 
ports  and  that  war  with  England  began  —  the 
war  which  ended  with  Elba.  Observe  that  on 
the  18th  day  of  May,  1804,  Napoleon  proclaimed 
himself  Emperor,  and  that  he  had  already 
begun  to  gather  his  army  at  Boulogne  and  the 
neighborhood 
for  an  inva 
sion  of  Eng 
land.  And 
consider  the 
use  he  would 
have  made  of 
twenty  steam 
barges. 

Of  the  com 
mittee  of  the 
Institute  to 
whom  the 
plans  had 
been  referred, 
F.  Emmanuel 
Molard  is 
named  first, 

he  or  his  brother  Claude  Pierre  Molard  —  both 
distinguished  French  engineers.     I  do  not  know 


NAPOLEON. 

From  the  etching  by  J.  David  after  the 
portrait  by  L.  David. 


26          MEMORIES   OF   A  HUNDRED   YEARS 

which  of  them  "  made  the  great  refusal."  The 
next  was  M.  Bovrel,  whose  name  even  is  not  in 
the  dictionaries ;  and  the  last  is  Montgolfier ! 
Was  there  a  covert  satire  in  appointing  the 
balloonist  ? 

What  we  know  is  that  Napoleon  and  the 
Institute  turned  a  cold  eye  on  the  little  steamer, 
though  they  must  have  seen  her  as  she  plied 
back  and  forth  on  the  Seine  that  summer.  And 
we  know  that  Livingston  did  believe  in  her,  and 
that  what  followed,  the  great  success  which 
made  steam  navigation  universal,  was  attained 
on  the  Hudson  and  not  on  the  Seine.  I  do  not 
find  the  date,  of  the  fatal  morning  when  the 
engine  broke  through  the  bottom  of  the  first 
boat.  But  it  was  early  in  the  spring.  It  was 
on  the  24th  of  January,  1803,  that  Fulton  had 
placed  a  model  of  it  in  the  hands  of  the  com 
mittee  of  the  Academy.  And,  as  I  have  said, 
it  was  in  August  of  that  year  that  the  larger 
boat  was  finished  and  made  her  first  trips  on 
the  river. 

I  have  called  "  Chancellor  Livingston,"  as  he 
was  called  in  those  days,  the  wisest  American  of 
his  time.  Franklin  had  died  in  1790.  In  the 
latter  part  of  his  life  the  Chancellor  wrote  his 
name  Kobert  R  Livingston,  to  distinguish  him- 


LIVINGSTON   AND   FULTON  27 

self  from  other  Roberts  in  the  family.1  As  early 
as  1795  he  had  obtained  from  the  State  of  New 
York  a  concession  of  an  exclusive  right  to  navi 
gate  with  steam  vessels  the  waters  of  that  State. 
I  suppose  his  attention  had  been  called  to  the 
subject  by  Jonathan  Fitch's  steamboat,  which 
had  run  on  the  Delaware  River  as  early  as  1787.2 
Navigation  by  steam  had  taken  such  a  hold  on 
the  minds  of  some  Americans  that  on  the  20th  of 
May,  1803,  Benjamin  Latrobe,  the  first  engineer 
in  America,  speaks  of  a  "  sort  of  mania,  which 
has  not  entirely  subsided,  for  impelling  boats  by 
steam  engines."  It  will  be  well  to  remember 
that  in  the  year  1800  there  were  but  five  steam 
engines  in  the  whole  country  —  small  engines  at 
that.  And  Latrobe  proved  that  this  was  a  mania 
by  the  paper  which  he  read  that  day  before  the 
Philosophical  Society  in  Philadelphia.  Apple- 
ton's  life  of  Fulton  gives  the  following  list  of 
those  who  had  used  steam  on  boats  of  any  de 
scription  :  Rumsey,  on  the  Potomac,  1785 ;  Fitch, 

1  A  correspondent  asks  me  why  Robert  R  Livingston  ("  R  " 
was  not  an  initial)  does  not  appear  among  the  signers  of  the 
Declaration  of  Independence.    It  is  because  it  was  supposed,  at 
the  moment,  that  he  was  more  needed  in  the  New  York  Assem 
bly,  and  he  was  in  his  place  there. 

2  Compare  p.  116  of  my  unknown  novel  "  East  and  West."  — 
E.  E.  H. 


28          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

on  the  Delaware,  1785,  1787;  Millar,  in  Scot 
land,  1787;  Read,  1789;  Longstreet  (Savannah), 
1790  ;  Samuel  Morey,  1794. 

Let  the  reader  observe  that  Fulton's  engine 
had  sunk  in  the  bottom  of  the  Seine  a  few  weeks 
before  Latrobe's  paper  was  read,  and  that  Fulton 
and  Livingston  were  beginning  on  the  larger  boat 
which  was  to  ply  on  that  river  in  August,  1803. 

Fulton  had  begun  life  as  a  painter.  There  is 
a  portrait  of  Franklin  by  him  painted  in  Phila 
delphia  when  Franklin  was  more  than  eighty 
and  Fulton  was  twenty  or  twenty-one.  He 
afterward  studied  the  art  of  painting  for  sev 
eral  years  in  London  with  Benjamin  West,  but 
he  became  more  and  more  interested  in  engi 
neering,  in  canals,  mills,  and  aqueducts.  He  was 
Lord  Stanhope's  friend.1  In  1794  he  went  to 
Paris,  where  he  exhibited  the  first  panorama 
ever  shown  there.  It  was  in  the  street  still 
known  as  the  "  Passage  des  Panorames,"  well 
known  to  artists  who  have  studied  in  Paris. 
He  was  the  friend  of  "  Columbiad  "  Barlow,  our 
Minister,  and  at  once,  apparently,  came  to  know 
Livingston  when  Livingston  arrived  there  as  suc 
cessor  to  Barlow. 

1  Stanhope  of  the  Printing-Press,  grandfather  of  Lord  Ma- 
hon  of  the  History. 


LIVINGSTON   AND    FULTON  29 

Livingston,  as  I  have  said,  had  been  inter 
ested  in  steamboats  as  early  as  1795.  He  and 
Fulton  were  in  full  sympathy.  The  only  refer 
ence  to  Fulton  in  Paris  which  I  have  found  in 
our  State  Paper  Office  is  in  a  letter  from  Liv 
ingston  to  the  State  Department  as  early  as 
May  22,  1802,  where  he  commends  Fulton's 
plans  for  a  diving  apparatus  and  torpedo,  but 
makes  no  reference  to  steam.  Perhaps  they 
had  not  yet  entered  on  that  matter,  or,  more 
probably,  Livingston  did  not  care  to  refer  to  it 
until  it  had  succeeded. 

Fulton's  panorama  was  successful,  and  the 
boat  built  on  the  Seine  was  built  at  the  joint 
expense  of  Fulton  and  Livingston.  While  Liv 
ingston  always  spoke  of  him  as  the  successful 
inventor,  Fulton  always  acknowledged  Living 
ston's  inestimable  service  to  the  great  enter 
prise.  One  of  the  early  American  steamboats 
was  the  Chancellor  Livingston.  I  know  that  I 
had  never  heard  of  this  great  man  when  I  first 
heard  of  this  steamboat. 

The  success  of  the  experiment  on  the  Seine 
induced  Fulton  and  Livingston  to  order  an 
engine  in  England,  which  was  that  used  on  the 
Clermont  on  her  first  successful  voyage  on  the 
Hudson  River. 


30          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

Robert  Livingston's  brother  welcomed  Robert 
Fulton  in  New  York,  and  assisted  him  in  the 
building  of  the  Clermont.  The  Clermont' s 
boiler  did  not  break  through  the  bottom,  and 
she  did  not  sink.  The  Clermont  went  to  Albany 
in  thirty  hours,  and  returned  to  New  York. 

In  the  autumn  of  1804  my  father  had  been 
twelve  days  going  in  a  passenger  sloop  from 
New  York  to  Troy,  above  Albany.  The  tradi 
tion  in  the  family  is  that  he  read  through  Gib 
bon's  "Decline  arid  Fall"  while  he  was  on  the 
passage. 

Poor  Mackintosh,  the  historian,  afterward  Sir 
James  Mackintosh,  was  in  exile  in  Bombay  at 
that  time,  working  his  way  along  in  the  East 
India  service,  and  horribly  homesick.  In  his 
diary  he  writes,  in  recording  Fulton's  success, 
"  0  that  we  had  lived  a  hundred  years  later ! " 

Dear  Sir  James,  we  do  live  ninety-three  years 
later,  and  we  do  not  need  a  hundred  days  to  go 
from  London  to  Bombay  ! l 

1  Mr.  Henry  Adams  quotes  from  a  letter  of  Jackson,  the 
English  minister,  who  had  a  summer  house  on  the  North  River, 
who  wrote  as  late  as  May,  1810,  that  every  day  there  was  a  gen 
eral  rush  of  his  household  to  see  the  steamboat  pass.  "  1  doubt 
whether  I  should  be  obeyed  were  I  to  desire  any  one  of  them 
to  take  a  passage  in  her."  This  was  in  the  fourth  year  of  the 
Clermont's  success. 


LIVINGSTON   AND    FULTON 


31 


I  have  risked  this  excursion  on  the  birth  of 
the  steamboat  because,  as  this  reader  and  I 
wander  down  through  the  mazes  of  the  century, 
we  shall  constantly  come  on  what  used  to  be 
called  u  internal  improvement" — the  business 
in  which  Robert  Fulton  thus  led  the  way. 

The  philosophical  reader,  which  means  the 
reader  of  sense,  will 
see  that  the  physical 
prosperity  of  the  na 
tion  in  the  nineteenth 
century  is  due  chiefly 
to  four  great  steps, 
one  might  say  four 
victories,  none  of 
which  in  the  begin 
ning  was  appreciated 
except  by  the  men 
who  won  them,  and 
the  one  clog  and 
drawback  on  the  country  from  1801  to  1900 
was  the  institution  of  slavery,  not  yet  done  with. 

To  get  some  good  working  idea  of  our  prog 
ress,  and  at  the  same  time  to  see  how  it  was 
clogged  and  thwarted  by  slavery  and  by  the 
combinations  necessary  to  support  it,  is  to  get 
some  available  notion  of  what  the  century  has 


THOMAS  JEFFERSON. 
After  a  French  portrait  of  1829. 


32          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

been  and  has  done  for  the  United  States. 
What  are  called  the  details  of  history,  such 
as  why  Madison  instead  of  Monroe  succeeded 
Jefferson,  or  why  Franklin  Pierce  instead  of 
some  other  cipher  succeeded  Mr.  Fillmore,  are 
wholly  insignificant  in  comparison. 

To  sum  up  the  hundred  years,  this  is  the 
retrospect.  On  the  first  of  January,  1801,  the 
United  States  was  a  belt  on  the  Atlantic  sea 
board  of  thirteen  weak  and  poor  communities, 
occupying  territory  which  hardly  ever  ran  back 
more  than  one  hundred  and  fifty  miles  from  the 
ocean.  They  had  united  themselves  together, 
but  they  did  not  yet  know  that  they  were  a 
nation.  Even  the  statesmen  of  that  day  would 
have  written,  "The  United  States  are  ready" 
or  "are  prepared,"  while  an  officer  of  ours 
to-day  would  say,  "  The  United  States  is  ready  " 
or  "is  prepared."  This  nation  in  the  gristle  had 
added  to  itself  the  interior  States  of  Vermont, 
Ohio,  Kentucky,  and  Tennessee.  But  these 
were  but  weak  frontier  communities,  and,  as  a 
whole,  the  people  on  the  seaboard  had  no  con 
ception  of  their  possibilities.  The  map  of  the 
nation  included  immense  regions  which  were 
practically  in  the  possession  of  savages.  Indeed, 
in  the  year  1801  there  were  in  the  territory  west 


LIVINGSTON   AND   FULTON  33 

of  the  Alleghanies  more  Indians,  wholly  untamed, 
than  people  of  European  blood. 

So  little  did  Livingston  know  what  he  was 
doing  that,  in  the  letter  in  which  he  announced 
to  President  Jefferson  Napoleon's  amazing  offer 
and  his  own  conclusion  of  the  great  purchase, 
he  says,  "  I  have  told  them  that  we  should  not 
send  an  emigrant  across  the  Mississippi  in  one 
hundred  years  "  ! 

These  men  had  the  aid  of  the  great  mer 
chants,  some  of  whom  are  remembered  and 
some  forgotten.  John  Jacob  Astor  was  one ; 
but  the  word  "Astor"  did  not  then  mean 
thousands  of  millions.  And  you  might  name 
by  the  side  of  the  merchants  Lewis,  whose  first 
name  I  am  afraid  the  reader  has  forgotten, 
and  Clark,  who  has  probably  not  fared  any 
better. 

Of  these  men  Fulton  and  Whitney  have  won 
their  way  among  the  twenty-nine  heroes  in  our 
New  York  "  Hall  of  Fame."  Fulton  had  eighty- 
six  votes  out  of  ninety-seven  of  the  votes  on  the 
"  Heroes."  Whitney  had  sixty-nine. 

Napoleon  startled  Livingston  when  he  pro 
posed  to  sell  to  the  United  States  the  whole  of 
Louisiana.  The  United  States  had  not  asked 
for  it,  had  not  wanted  it.  The  United  States 


VOL.    I.  L> 


34          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

did  want  the  city  of  Orleans,  and  the  whole 
eastern  bank  from  our  State  of  Mississippi  to 
the  Gulf  of  Mexico.  That  is,  we  had  proposed 
'to  buy  from  France  all  that  part  of  our  present 
State  of  Louisiana  which  lies  on  the  northeast 
side  of  the  Mississippi.  Under  the  treaty  with 
England  of  1783  we  held  all  the  country  from 
the  Alleghanies  to  the  Mississippi,  north  of 
that  parallel  of  31  degrees  which  makes  a  jog 
in  the  m#p,  and  in  a  convenient,  rough  fashion 
makes  a  sort  of  letter  L  of  our  State  of  Louisi 
ana.  Now,  to  his  amazement,  Marbois  offers  to 
Livingston  the  region  which  is  now  western 
Louisiana,  Arkansas,  Missouri,  Iowa,  Minne 
sota,  North  and  South  Dakota,  Nebraska,  and 
Kansas,  and  everything  west  of  these  States  as 
far  as  the  Rocky  Mountains.  Indeed,  we  have 
not  wanted  advocates  who  claim  that  French 
Louisiana  went  farther  than  the  Rocky  Moun 
tain  range,  even  to  the  Pacific. 

Jefferson  would  never  have  dared  to  accept 
this  magnificent  offer.  For  he  was  pledged  to 
the  strictest  construction  of  the  Constitution. 
Until  he  died  he  dared  not  say  that  he  was 
authorized  to  make  this  great  purchase.  But 
Livingston  had  no  such  scruples.  He  bravely 
accepted  the  proposal,  only  struggling  to  beat 


LIVINGSTON   AND   FULTON  35 

down  the  sum  which  he  was  to  pay.  To  reas 
sure  Jefferson,  Livingston  told  him  that  he  had 
already  secured  such  promises  that  we  could 
"  recoup  "  ourselves  and  get  back  all  our  fifteen 
million  dollars  by  selling  again  everything  west 
of  the  river.  It  hardly  appears  who  it  was  with 
whom  he  made  such  a  bargain. 

This  is  the  man  —  the  man  to  whose  courage 
we  owe  half  our  empire,  the  man  who,  with 
Fulton  and  the  steamboat,  gave  the  untold 
value  to  the  deserts  he  bought  —  he  is  the  man 
to  whom  we  cannot  give  a  niche  or  a  bronze  in 
our  "Hall  of  Fame." 

For  this  magnificent  purchase  the  country 
had  to  pay.  The  English  house  of  Barings  at 
once  offered  to  negotiate  the  loan,  by  which 
Livingston  was  able  to  pay  the  money.  But 
Congress  must  authorize  the  loan,  must  assume 
the  responsibility  of  the  purchase,  and  must 
provide  a  government  for  the  city  of  Orleans 
and  for  the  posts  on  the  western  side  of  the 
river.  So  the  whole  question  of  the  advantage 
or  disadvantage  of  the  purchase  was  thrown 
open  to  the  people  of  America,  almost  precisely 
as  the  question  regarding  the  purchase  of  the 
Philippines  had  been  thrown  open  since  the 
Spanish  war. 


36          MEMOEIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

In  Congress  and  in  the  country  the  discussion 
went  forward  on  lines  which  show  almost  pain 
fully  the  limits  of  human  wisdom,  especially  of 
human  foresight.  Not  one  word  to  intimate 
that  before  twenty  years  were  over  the  river 
steamers  of  the  West  will  be  running  up  to  the 
headwaters  of  the  smallest  "creek."  Not  one 
word  to  prophesy  that  a  steady  wave  of  popula 
tion  would  carry  the  frontier  seventeen  miles 
farther  with  every  new  year.1  Least  of  all  did 
any  one  prophesy  that,  far  beyond  those  fertile 
river  valleys,  what  the  hunters  called  "  deserts  " 
were  to  become  productive  fields,  and  were  to 
answer  for  half  the  world  its  prayer  for  daily 
bread. 

The  reader  of  to-day  hardly  remembers,  in 
deed,  that  there  were  times  when  the  market 
cost  of  a  bushel  of  corn  was  spent  when  it  had 
been  carried  forty  miles.  As  late  as  1830  I 
heard  the  jest  which  ridiculed  an  emigrant  from 
Massachusetts  by  saying  that  he  left  his  home  a 
year  before  to  go  West  with  a  jug  of  molasses  to 
use  in  trade,  and  that  he  returned  at  the  end  of 
a  year  of  adventure,  having  made  enough  in  bar- 

1  This  was  the  curious  calculation  of  De  Tocqueville  in  1829. 
His  calculation  proved  good  with  singular  accuracy  for  a  gen 
eration  more. 


ELI   WHITNEY  37 

gaining  to  pay  him  for  the  jug.  For  years  after 
the  century  came  in  caricatures  were  printed  on 
the  seaboard  ridiculing  emigration.  And  the 
dominant  tone  in  the  warnings  of  statesmen 
against  the  ratification  of  the  great  purchase 
was  the  inconsistent  fear  that  it  would  rob  the 
seaboard  of  its  inhabitants.  If  the  country  were 
so  worthless,  what  danger  was  there  that  the 
shrewd  men  and  women  of  the  East  should  wish 
to  go  there  ? 

ELI   WHITNEY 

As  always  happens  when  a  great  inventor  as 
left  to  the  world  the  result  of  his  own  persever 
ance  and  ingenuity,  there  has  arisen  in  the  gen 
eration  which  followed  Whitney's  death  a  set  of 
screeching  crickets,  or  cynics,  call  them  which 
you  please,  who  really  think  that  somebody  else 
made  this  great  invention.  There  are  plenty  of 
people  who  will  tell  you  that  Fulton  and  Living 
ston  did  not  introduce  steam  navigation.1  And 
within  the  last  thirty  years  there  have  appeared 
at  the  South  plenty  of  people  who  will  tell  you 
of  men  who  had  invented  the  cotton-gin,  whose 
invention  Eli  Whitney  stole. 

1  As  many  as  twenty  of  them  have  written  to  me  since  these 
words  were  printed  in  the  Outlook.  I  am  much  obliged  to 
them.  — E.  E.  H. 


38          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

Very  fortunately,  a  large  body  of  Whitney's 
sad  letters  of  that  time  have  been  preserved. 
They  have  lately  been  edited  and  published  by 
Dr.  Hammond ;  and  nothing  is  now  more  clear 
than  that  each  one  of  these  so-called  inventors  is 


ELI  WHITNEY. 
An  engraving  after  the  portrait  by  C.  B.  King. 

a  pretender,  and  is  one  of  the  people  who  tried 
to  steal  Whitney's  invention  after  he  had  brought 
it  before  the  public. 

Stated  briefly,  the  history  is  this  :  Eli  Whitney 
graduated  from  Yale  College  in  1792,  and,  in 
tending  to  be  a  teacher,  he  went  to  Georgia, 
where  he  was  introduced  to  Mrs,  Greene,  the 


ELI   WHITNEY  39 

widow  of  General  Nathanael  Greene,  of  Rhode 
Island.  Greene  had  saved  Georgia  from  its 
English  enemies,  and  the  State  of  Georgia  had 
presented  to  him  a  plantation,  on  which  his 
widow  was  living.  In  the  first  winter  of  Whit 
ney's  stay  there  he  was  a  tutor  in  her  family. 
Some  gentlemen  at  her  table  were  speaking  of 
the  disadvantage  to  their  State  because  the  cost 
of  preparing  the  cotton  was  so  great.  Every 
body  was  wishing  for  a  machine  to  clean  the 
cotton  from  the  seeds.  Now,  Whitney  had 
mended  Mrs.  Greene's  tambour  frame.  She  said, 
"  Here  is  Mr.  Whitney,  who  will  invent  for  you 
what  you  want."  Whitney  had  at  that  time 
never  seen  a  boll  of  cotton.  He  went  to  work 
at  once,  and  the  cotton-gin  was  the  result. 

It  is  curious  to  observe,  in  our  present  line  of 
study,  that  he  himself  went  with  the  specifica 
tions  which  were  requisite  for  the  patent,  and 
visited  Thomas  Jefferson  in  Philadelphia.  It  is 
really  the  subject  for  a  historical  picture.  Jef 
ferson  was  Secretary  of  State  under  Washington. 
The  department  of  invention  was  so  small  and 
the  business  of  patents  was  so  new  that  the 
granting  of  the  patent  depended  upon  the  De 
partment  of  State.  So  Whitney  called  upon 
Jefferson  in  person  and  left  his  papers  with  him. 


40          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

It  is  an  important  incident,  and  it  adds  to  what 
is  even  the  pathos  of  the  fact,  that  Jefferson 
scarcely  alludes  to  the  invention  in  his  after  life, 
and  does  not  seem  to  have  known  that  Whitney 
played  a  much  more  important  part  in  the  de 
velopment  of  the  fortunes  of  this  country  than 
he  did  himself.  Yet  Jefferson  thought  he  was 
an  inventor,  and  plumed  himself  on  being  a  man 
of  science,  and  was  dabbling  with  scientific  in 
quiries  from  the  beginning  to  the  end  of  his 
life. 

THEN   AND  NOW 

It  seems  impossible  to  describe  the  change  in 
every  habit  of  life  between  those  days  and  these 
days.  Impossible  even  to  imagine  men's  out 
ward  life  then,  more  impossible  to  picture  it. 
Here  is  the  diary  of  my  father's  father,  written 
three  or  four  lines  at  a  time,  every  night,  at  the 
desk  where  I  wrote  a  few  words  not  long  ago,  in 
the  sacred  study  to  which  he  called  his  boy  from 
digging  potatoes.  He  is  a  well-educated  Christian 
gentleman,  forty-nine  years  old ;  one  day  he  is 
reading  Hebrew,  one  day  he  reads  Greek,  one 
day  he  reads  "comedy,"  one  day  it  is  "attend 
to  missionary  pamphlets  and  read  them,"  one 
day  "rule  most  of  a  record,"  some  "texts  in 


THEN   AND    NOW  41 

textuary"  or  "texts  in  Bible  order/'  one  day 
"  examine  Greek  criticisms."  And  these  entries 
are  all  mixed  in  with  "  Plant  little  Indian  corn 
south  of  burying  ground/'  "  Begin  to  move  little 
fence  and  plough  a  little/'  "  Dung  and  ash  in 
the  holes  for  potatoes  and  ploughed  about  one 
acre  of  my  orchard/'  "  Killed  two  pigs,  plant 
land,  read  news,  etc.,"  "  Cloudy  Lord's  Day, 
preached  No.  2342,  2343,  begin  to  ask  children 
their  catechism,  evening  extempore  Colossians 
i.  19."  Into  the  midst  of  such  entries  will  come, 
"  Sent  horses  for  Nathan,"  and  then  "  Nathan 
comes  from  Williams  College,"  and  the  next 
day,  "  Afternoon  with  Nathan,  bring  cow  from 
Mr.  R.  Lyman's,  bought  211." 

All  journeys  were  on  horseback.  When 
Nathan's  father  and  mother  go  to  visit  her 
father  and  mother,  seventy  miles,  they  go  on 
horseback.  When  the  Westhampton  congrega 
tion  vote  their  minister  ten  weeks'  vacation  that 
he  may  go  on  a  missionary  journey  into  the 
frontier  towns  of  Maine,  he  goes  on  horseback, 
riding  sometimes  twenty  miles  a  day,  sometimes 
more  than  forty.  Two  or  three  times  in  this 
journey  he  "puts  up"  his  horse  at  an  inn,  and, 
in  that  case,  he  pays  ninepence  of  New  England 
currency,  the  Spanish  real  of  that  day,  twelve 


42          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

and  one-half  cents  of  ours.  1  found  the  price  the 
same  in  New  Hampshire  in  1841.  But  for  him 
self,  the  missionary  always,  I  believe,  sleeps  at 
some  private  house  —  a  minister's  house,  if  there 
be  a  minister.  And  this,  observe,  in  charming 
disrespect  of  sectarian  lines.  Hard-shelled  Cal- 
vinist  as  he  is,  if  there  is  a  Freewill  Baptist 
meeting-house  in  the  town,  he  preaches  there 
when  the  "  L.'s  Day  "  comes  round. 

The  leisure  of  such  a  life  is  varied  by  making 
a  spelling-book  which  he  printed,  arranged  on 
an  improved  principle,  and  by  the  most  sedulous 
daily  intimacy  in  the  homes  of  seven  hundred 
people,  scattered  over  a  mountain  township  of 
thirty  square  miles. 

When  I  visit  the  old  homestead,  which  is  a 
very  dear  place  to  me,  they  show  me  the  grove 
of  locust  trees  which  he  planted,  the  ever  flow 
ing  stream  of  water  from  the  hillside  which  he 
brought  down  into  the  generous  open-air  room 
where  half  the  work  of  that  house  was  done  when 
I  was  a  boy.  And  if  I  am  fortunate  enough 
to  go  to  meeting  there  when  the  Lord's  Day 
comes  round,  why,  all  my  contemporaries  tell 
me  how  this  dear  old  saint  taught  them  their 
catechisms,  and  all  the  younger  people  of  after 
generations  thank  me  for  the  blessing  of  this 


THEN   AND    NOW  43 

life  as  they  have  heard  it  from  fathers  or  grand 
fathers. 

One  tries  to  make  a  picture  of  such  life  with 
out  much  success.  But  one  can  see  that  in  its 
simplicity  there  were  elements  of  strength  for 
those  who  grew  up  in  such  surroundings.  "Lead 
us  not  into  temptation." 

The  Hampshire  group  of  college  boys  made 
a  rendezvous  somewhere  between  Westhampton, 
Southampton,  and  Northampton,  each  on  "a  horse 
which  he  had  groomed  himself ,  nay,  probably, 
which,  he  had  watched,  fed,  and  groomed  since 
the  colt  was  born.  One  or  two  younger  brothers, 
also  on  horseback,  accompanied  the  student  party 
to  bring  the  horses  home.  As  the  bird  flies,  the 
distance  is  about  forty-two  miles.  By  the  turn 
pike,  on  which  most  of  the  journey  was  made,  I 
suppose  it  was  four  or  five  miles  longer. 

Sam  Weller  says  of  the  gatekeepers  on  turn 
pikes,  "  If  they  was  gentlemen,  you  would  call 
them  misanthropes ;  as  they  is  not  gentlemen, 
they  takes  to  pike-keeping."  And  in  the  soli 
tudes  of  Berkshire  County,  as  everywhere,  the 
pike-keeper  found  that  he  had  to  meet  that  dis 
favor  which  hangs  over  all  collectors  of  revenue. 
As  the  merry  troop  of  boy  students  approached  the 
several  pikes,  all  would  dismount  and  walk,  driv- 


44          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

ing  all  their  horses  before  them.  For  there  was 
no  toll  needed  for  footmen.  Then  they  would  ex 
plain  to  the  pike-keeper  that  this  was  a  drove  of 
cattle  which  were  to  be  paid  for  at  so  much  a  head, 
the  whole  amount  being  much  less,  of  course,  than 
so  many  cavaliers  in  the  saddle  would  pay.  This 
little  story  always  delighted  us  as  children  when 
my  father  told  it.  Perhaps  all  children  and  sav 
ages  rejoice  in  any  evasion  of  the  law  !  And  when 
we  asked  how  this  strike  ended,  he  would  say  that 
if  the  pike-keeper  were  good-natured  "  he  would 
give  us  a  drink  of  cider  all  round,  and  we  would 
consent  to  mount  our  horses  and  pay  the  toll." 

In  1901  is  the  journey  of  Clarence  Fitz-Mor- 
timer,  as  he  takes  the  Pullman  from  Chicago  to 
Williamstown,  lighted  up  by  any  such  picturesque 
adventure  ? 

Perhaps  the  contrast  between  that  life  and  our 
life  most  striking  is  the  difference  between  the 
mails  of  the  two  periods  and  what  they  carried. 

Charles  Elliott,  the  historian,  when  he  was 
asked  if  he  believed  that  Abraham  lived  to  be 
a  hundred  and  sixty,  said :  "  Why  not  ?  He  had 
no  bad  whiskey  to  drink,  no  primaries  to  attend, 
and  no  newspapers  to  read."  And  Saint  Marc 
Girardin,  describing  that  earthly  paradise  of 
North  Africa  in  the  second  century,  says  of  the 


THEN   AND   NOW  45 

Roman  gentlemen  who  lived  there  then :  "  Above 
all,  they  were  without  the  mail,  which  is  the  bur 
den  of  our  modern  civilization."  The  Williams- 
town  boy  and  his  father  were  not  much  harassed 
by  the  mail  or  by  newspapers.  To  my  grand 
father  a  newspaper  was  so  rare  a  visitor  that 
he  enters  in  the  diary  so  severely  condensed, 
"  Read  news,"  when  the  Hampshire  Gazette, 
came  round.  Once  in  a  term,  perhaps,  you 
find,  "  Wrote  to  Nathan,"  and  as  often,  perhaps, 
"  Letter  from  Nathan."  "  So  happily,  the  days 
of  Thalaba  went  by."  Indeed,  I  observe  that 
authors  who  want  to  describe  serenity  of  mind 
generally  agree  in  cutting  off  communication 
from  the  outward  world.  But  when  a  news 
paper  did  break  through  —  yes!  it  had  news 
worth  telling.  Still  I  do  not  suppose  that  in 
1801  the  Hampshire  Gazette  or  any  Albany 
Weekly  told  of  the  murder  of  my  poor  friend 
Philip  Nolan  by  the  Spanish  Governor  of  Texas. 
I  do  not  suppose,  indeed,  that  it  was  mentioned 
in  any  newspaper  in  the  United  States.  I  do  not 
suppose  that  in  1802  either  of  those  newspapers 
spoke  of  the  cotton  crop,  or  of  Eli  Whitney's 
cotton-gin,  or  of  the  manufacture  of  cotton. 
Very  likely  the  word  "  cotton  "  was  not  in  either 
newspaper  from  January  to  December. 


1801-1807 


CHAPTER   II 

1801-1807 
FAILURES  AND  FOLLIES 

WHOEVER  studies  the  marvellous  physical 
advance  of  the  country  in  the  first  half 
of  the  century  will  find  that  those  four  lines  of 
physical  success  which  we  have  been  tracing 
suggest  directions  tin  which  the  United  States 
made  the  most  important  physical  progress. 

Meanwhile  crickets  were  chirping  and  politi 
cians  were  intriguing  and  voting,  and,  among 
the  rest,  Jefferson  and  Madison  were  Presidents 
in  the  first  sixteen  years  of  the  century.  And 
Congresses  met  and  talked  and  went  to  their 
own  place.  A  war  with  England  got  itself  pro 
claimed  and  dragged  to  an  end.  And  so  a  good 
deal  of  what  is  called  "  history  "  got  itself  writ 
ten;  of  which  a  good  deal,  especially  when 
looked  at  under  the  microscope,  is  really  enter 
taining,  though  perhaps  not  very  edifying. 
Meanwhile  the  country  did  as  it  always  does. 


VOL.   I.  — E 


50          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

It  governed  itself,  and  with  a  steady  step 
marched  forward  and  upward,  as  it  has  proved. 

Such  memorials  as  I  am  bringing  together 
must  give  some  notice  of  failures  as  well  as  of 
victories.  One  must  admit  that  the  crickets 
chirped  and  the  katydids  discussed  the  biography 
of  Catherine,  although  it  never  turned  out  that 
Catherine  did  anything,  and  that  the  crickets 
said  anything  that  amounted  to  much. 

But  we  will  devote  two  or  three  pages  here 
partly  to  smoke  and  dust,  partly  to  chirping  and 
chattering,  partly  to  Burr's  plots  and  partly  to 
Jefferson's  plans.  Such  pages  are  always  neces 
sary  in  history.  Thus,  Mr.  David  Hume  devotes 
more  space  to  the  story  of  the  Countess  of  Salis 
bury's  garter  than  he  does  to  the  Black  Death, 
which  in  the  same  year  and  the  next  swept  away 
a  quarter  part  of  the  people  of  England.  And 
Dr.  Lingard  even  manages,  it  is  hard  to  tell  how, 
to  give  a  volume  to  the  history  of  King  James 
the  Fool,  without  so  much  as  referring  to  the 
Eeceived  Version  of  the  English  Bible,  or  to  the 
settlement  of  Virginia  and  Plymouth.  James 
Town  and  James  River  have  no  place  in  his 
history  of  King  James. 


JAMES   WILKINSON  51 

JAMES  WILKINSON 

Jefferson  was  inaugurated  on  the  4th  of 
March,  1801.  Eighteen  days  after,  when  as 
yet  nobody  west  of  the  Mississippi  knew 
whether  he  were  President  or  were  not  Presi 
dent,  Philip  Nolan,  an  adventurer  from  Ken 
tucky,  was  killed  in  the  neighborhood  of  what 
is  now  the  town  of  Waco  in  Texas.  He  was 
murdered,  I  think ;  for,  while  he  was  in  Texas 
under  the  orders  of  the  Spanish  Governor  of 
"  Orleans,"  he  was  killed  by  the  soldiers  of  Spain, 
acting  under  the  orders  of  the  Spanish  Governor 
of  Texas.  He  was  an  American  citizen  who 
had  been  the  partner  in  trade  with  James  Wil 
kinson,  the  Major-General  who  commanded  the 
army  of  the  United  States  in  the  Mississippi 
Valley.  We  now  know  that  at  that  time  Wil 
kinson  was  secretly  in  the  pay  of  the  King  of 
Spain.  But  there  is  no  reason  for  saying  that 
Nolan  ever  knew  of  this  bribery  and  treason. 

I  became  interested  in  this  Captain  Nolan,  as 
he  was  generally  called  by  the  writers  of  his 
time,  by  mere  accident,  or,  if  you  please,  by 
inexcusable  carelessness  of  mine.  In  the  Civil 
War  I  was  writing  a  story  which  I  called  "  The 
Man  Without  a  Country,"  in  the  hope  of  quick- 


52 


MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED    YEARS 


ening  the  National  sentiment  of  the  time.     In 
studying  for  this  story  I  read  what  I  suppose 


PHILIP  NOLAN'S  SIGNATURE. 

Aifixed  to  a  receipt  of  merchandise,  Sept.  28,  1795.    From  the  original 
in  the  possession  of  the  author. 


JAMES   WILKINSON  53 

no  man  living  except  myself  has  read,  this 
General  Wilkinson's  "  Memoirs."  When  I  had 
to  choose  the  name  for  my  hero,  recollecting 
Wilkinson's  partner,  Nolan,  I  called  my  man 
«  Nolan." 

It  was  always  suspected,  as  long  as  General 
Wilkinson  lived,  that  he  was  a  traitor,  in  the 
pay  of  the  Spanish  King.  This  was  treason 
double  refined,  when  Wilkinson  was  in  com 
mand  of  the  American  army  in  the  Valley  of 
the  Mississippi,  "  the  Legion  of  the  West,"  as 
it  was  then  called  officially.  It  was  precisely 
as  if,  on  the  18th  of  September,  1902,  General 
Chaff ee,  in  command  at  Manila,  should  be  re 
ceiving,  by  a  secret  arrangement,  his  annual 
remittance  of  three  thousand  dollars  from  the 
Emperor  of  Japan,  or  from  the  King  of  Spain. 

I  say  this  was  suspected  while  Wilkinson 
lived.  Mysterious  kegs  of  silver  came  up  from 
"Orleans"  while  "Orleans"  was  still  a  Spanish 
town,  and  were  addressed  to  General  Wilkin 
son.  Once,  and  I  believe  twice,  he  was  court- 
martialled,  or  there  was  a  "  court  of  inquiry." 
It  seems  to  me  a  little  queer  that  Nolan's  re 
ceipt,  which  I  copy  from  the  original,  should 
speak  so  briefly  of  two  thousand  dollars'  worth 
of  "merchandise."  But  I  do  not  know  that 


54          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

the  merchandise  was  Spanish  dollars.     Wilkin 
son  was  an  old  fox,  if  foxes  ever  cover  their 


GENERAL  JAMES  WILKINSON.    PHILIP  NOLAN'S  PARTNER. 

From  an  etching  by  Max  Rosenthal  after  the  por 
trait  by  C.  W.  Peale. 

tracks,  and  he  had  covered  his  so  well  that  the 
charges  were  never  proved. 

He  had  the  prestige  which  his  service  in  the 
Ke volution  commanded.  He  was  one  of  Gates' s 
aides  at  Saratoga,  and  when  I  saw  Wilkinson's 
papers  in  1876,  there  were  among  them  two 
autograph  notes  from  Burgoyne  to  Gates,  one 


JAMES   WILKINSON  55 

proposing  a  conference  with  a  view  to  surrender, 
and  another  arranging  the  terms  for  the  final 
ceremony.  Somehow  or  other,  he  did  cover  his 
tracks  in  his  treasons,  and  was  acquitted  by  the 
courts.  The  three  volumes  of  his  "  Memoirs " 
are  seasoned  all  along  by  references  to  these 
trials,  and  by  lame  explanations  or  excuses. 
And  Wilkinson  died  without  public  disgrace. 
I  believe  that  he  was  as  false  to  Aaron  Burr 
as  he  was  to  the  country. 

But  time  rolled  on,  and  time  sometimes  brings 
its  -revenges.  In  the  prosperous  days  before  the 
Civil  War,  the  State  of  Louisiana  was  collecting 
the  materials  for  its  romantic  early  history. 
Mr.  Charles  Gayarre,  one  of  our  distinguished 
historians,  was  sent  to  Spain  to  follow  out  the 
traces  of  that  short  period  of  the  eighteenth 
century  when  the  French  had  transferred  their 
great  province  of  Louisiana  to  Spanish  control. 
The  Spanish  Government  opened  its  archives 
freely  to  Mr.  Gayarre,  and  there  he  found,  from 
year  to  year,  the  full  details  of  this  infamous 
treason,  beginning  as  early  as  1788.  The  King 
of  Spain  regularly  paid  Wilkinson  two  or  three 
thousand  dollars  a  year  while  Wilkinson  com 
manded  our  "  Legion  of  the  West."  This  the 
papers  in  the  Spanish  archives  make  certain. 


56          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

Mr.  Gayarre*  told  me  in  1876  how  it  hap 
pened  that  such  unbounded  confidence  was 
placed  in  him  by  his  Spanish  friends.  He 
went  out  to  Madrid  with  proper  introductions 
from  our  Secretary  of  State  and  from  the  Gov 
ernor  of  Louisiana.  Our  minister,  Romulus 
Saunders  presented  these  papers,  and  then  Mr. 
Gayarre  waited.  But  manana  seemed  to  be 
the  word.  He  did  not  get  forward  at  all.  At 
last  he  wrote  back  to  our  historian,  Prescott, 
and  said  that  he  made  no  progress.  Prescott 
wrote  at  once  to  Madrid,  to  his  friend  Gayan- 
gos,  the  accomplished  scholar,  to  whom  all  of 
us  who  care  about  American  history  are  so 
largely  indebted.  Prescott  wrote  and  asked 
Gayangos,  in  Spain,  why  they  did  not  help  his 
friend,  Mr.  Gayarre.  To  which  Gayangos  re 
plied  :  "  How  should  we  know  he  was  your 
friend  ?  We  do  not  fancy  your  Mr.  Saunders, 
and  we  have  had  no  other  introduction.  But 
if  he  is  your  friend,  he  shall  see  everything." 
And  Gayarre  did  see  everything :  and  that  is 
the  way  that  we  know  of  Wilkinson's  treason. 
I  suppose  there  is  a  certain  etiquette  among 
governments  which  imposes  a  certain  time  limit 
on  the  revelation  of  such  state  secrets.  I  know 
that  in  1859  I  was  not  permitted  in  London 


JAMES   WILKINSON  57 

to  see  papers  of  which  our  lamented  friend 
Benjamin  Stevens  has  since  printed  facsimile 
copies. 

So  we  are  now  happily  sure  of  Wilkinson's 
treason.  I  say  "happily"  because  it  always 
pleases  me  to  refer  to  it  when  grumblers  tell 
me  that  to-day  and  yesterday  compare  unfavora 
bly  for  political  morality  with  the  times  of  the 
men  of  the  Revolution. 

And  I  am  apt  to  say  that  it  does  not  speak 
well  for  Jefferson's  statesmanship,  or  his  knowl 
edge  of  men,  that  for  eight  years  he  maintained 
such  a  rascal  as  Wilkinson  in  a  post  so  impor 
tant.  He  knew  that  Wilkinson  had  betrayed 
Burr.  He  must  have  suspected  that  Wilkinson 
had  been  the  tool  of  Spain.  He  could  easily 
have  found  it  out  had  he  wanted  to,  and  yet  he 
kept  him  in  this  important  military  command. 

The  history  of  this  box  of  Wilkinson's  papers, 
almost  invaluable,  is  in  itself  dramatic.  My  dis 
tinguished  friend,  John  Mason  Brown,  of  Ken 
tucky,  had  told  me  of  the  existence  of  the 
papers.  I  worked  over  them  at  Louisville  for 
an  afternoon  in  April,  1876.  I  took  a  few 
notes  from  them,  but  I  was  confident  that  the 
War  Department  would  buy  them  from  the 
owner,  so  that  I  took  only  a  few  notes.  As 


58          MEMORIES   OF  A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

soon  as  I  returned  to  Boston,  I  addressed  a  letter 
to  the  Department  on  the  subject,  but  the  time 
was  unfortunate,  and  the  Department  did  noth 
ing.  Meanwhile,  the  owner  of  the  trunk  had  con 
ceived  very  exaggerated  notions  of  the  value  of 
the  documents.  Indeed,  even  to  Philistines  the 
autographs  of  Burgoyrie,  of  Gates,  of  Burr,  of 
Hamilton,  of  Philip  Nolan,  and  of  the  New 
Orleans  Clark  would  have  brought  large  prices 
at  auction.  But  no  buyer  appeared,  and  only 
two  years  ago  the  owner  of  these  materials  of 
history  carried  the  box  out  to  a  vacant  lot  in 
Louisville,  built  a  fire  around  it,  and  burned  all 
the  papers.  In  this  melodramatic  sacrifice  of 
his,  the  precious  autographs  went  to  the  skies 
in  the  form  of  highly  diluted  carbon. 

GENERAL  EATON  AND  DERNE 

The  humor,  if  one  may  call  it  so,  of  Jeffer 
son's  administration  comes  in  where  he  is  con 
stantly  obliged  to  take  exactly  the  part  which 
he  and  his  had  always  condemned  before  he 
came  to  the  throne.  This  comes  almost  to 
burlesque  when  we  find  an  American  army 
really  crossing  northern  Africa  for  the  capture 
of  the  city  of  Derne  —  which  American  army 
supposed  itself  to  be  moving  by  Jefferson's 


GENERAL  EATON   AND   DERNE 


59 


orders.  The  whole  transaction  has  in  it  an 
element  of  absurdity  which  makes  the  politi 
cians  drop  it  from  memory  as  something  which 
it  is  better  to  say  nothing  about. 

But  it  left  one  funny  remembrancer  of  itself 
which  still  exists  in  Egypt.  In  the  year  1803 
our  navy  was 
engaged  in 
that  war  with 
Tripoli  in 
which  the  in 
fant  navy  was 
baptized.  It 
proved  that 
there  was  a 
certain  Hamet 
Caramelliwho 
thought  he 
was  the  law 
ful  heir  to  the 
crown  of  Tripoli.  Our  young  readers  will  think 
that  members  of  this  family  burnt  sugar-cane 
for  their  young  friends.  Look  in  the  dictionary 
and  you  will  find  cana-mella  or  cana-mellis.  He 
made  interest  with  our  diplomatic  agents  in  the 
Mediterranean,  and  proposed  to  them  a  military 
expedition  by  which  he  should  oust  the  reigning 


GENERAL  EATON. 
Engraving  by  Hamlin. 


60 


MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 


Pasha  of  Tripoli,  with,  whose  vessels  our  vessels 
were  fighting.  This  proposal  of  his  came  to 
Jefferson  and  his  Cabinet  at  a  time  when  they 
thought  themselves  sufficiently  annoyed  by  the 
complications  of  this  naval  war. 

One  of   those  wild   geese  who   are   born   to 


GEN.  WILLIAM  EATON  AND  HAMET  CAEAMELLI. 
On  the  Desert  of  Barca,  approaching  Derne. 

bring  trouble  to  governments,  "a  Connecticut 
Yankee/'  Mr.  Adams  calls  him,  a  man  named 
William  Eaton,  had  taken  this  matter  in  charge. 
He  was  our  consul  at  Tunis,  about  four  hundred 
miles  from  Tripoli.  He  fell  in  with  Hamet 
Caramelli,  and  came  to  America  to  tell  the 
President  that  it  would  be  a  good  plan  for 


GENERAL   EATON   AND   DERNE  61 

us  to  restore  him  to  his  place  as  rightful  Pasha, 
and  that  then  grateful  Hamet  and  his  party 
would  make  any  treaty  he  liked  with  us.  I 
had  the  opportunity  thirty  years  ago  to  read  all 
Eaton's  papers.  He  was  a  daring  fellow,  angry 
with  people  who  did  not  take  his  views  of 
things. 

It  is  clear  enough  that  at  Washington  he  had 
received  that  sort  of  attention  which  timid  gov 
ernments  are  apt  to  bestow  on  spirited  soldiers 
and  sailors.  Virtually  he  was  told  that  if  he 
succeeded  in  any  plans  of  his  in  the  Mediter 
ranean,  the  Government  would  take  all  the 
credit,  and  if  he  failed  he  would  have  to  pay 
all  the  penalty.  Many  an  officer  before  Eaton 
has  found  himself  in  the  same  condition,  and 
some  officers  since.  But  that  Jefferson  did  not 
throw  him  over,  or  mean  to  throw  him  over,  is 
clear  enough,  because  he  appointed  Eaton  our 
naval  agent  in  the  Mediterranean  and  sent  him 
back.  He  appeared  at  Cairo  the  8th  of  Decem 
ber,  1804,  and  hunted  up  Hamet.  He  brought 
him  to  Alexandria,  where  Hamet  and  he  col 
lected  an  army  of  five  hundred  men,  of  whom 
one  hundred,  who  were  called  Christians,  were 
recruited  in t Alexandria.  "At  about  the  time 
when  President  Jefferson  was  delivering  his 


62          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

second  inaugural  address,  the  naval  agent  led 
his  little  army  into  the  desert  with  the  courage 
of  Alexander  the  Great,  to  conquer  an  African 
kingdom."  These  are  Mr.  Adams's  words. 

Briefly  told,  Eaton  and  Hamet  marched  their 
army  five  hundred  miles  across  the  desert  up  to 
the  city  of  Derne.  They  frightened  the  reigning 
Pasha  very  badly,  and  our  fleet  under  Commo 
dore  Barron  was  also  frightening  him.  He  made 
a  treaty,  gave  up  the  prisoners  whom  he  had,  and 
we  had  the  satisfaction  of  teaching  Europe  how 
these  barbarians  were  to  be  handled.  But  poor 
Hamet  Caramelli  was  left  out  in  the  cold,  and 
poor  Eaton  was  left  with  a  claim  upon  the  Gov 
ernment  which  he  found  it  hard  to  collect.  I 
am  sorry  to  say  that  he  died  a  drunkard  in  1811. 

All  Eaton's  papers  are,  I  suppose,  at  this  mo 
ment  in  the  large  trunk  from  which  I  took  them 
when  I  read  them  in  the  year  1864.  It  is  a 
pity  that  the  War  Department  should  not  have 
them,  but  I  have  always  found  it  rather  hard  to 
make  the  War  Department  pick  up  papers  which 
bear  on  our  old  history.  At  the  time  I  knew  of 
them  they  were  the  property  of  the  great  auto 
graph  collector,  Dr.  Sprague,  of  Albany. 

A  memorial  of  Eaton  which  -still  survives  is 
the  relic  in  "  the  American  colony  at  Cairo  "  of 


GENERAL   EATON    AND   DERNE  63 

his  little  army.  All  these  hundred  "  Christians," 
so  called,  who  marched  with  the  four  hundred 
Arabs  to  conquer  Derne,  obtained  in  that  march 
the  rights  of  American  citizens  for  themselves, 
for  their  children,  and  their  children's  children 
—  rights  which,  in  a  country  which  has  been 
governed  as  Egypt  has  been  until  within  a  few 
years,  have  been  of  the  first  importance  and 
value.  When  my  brother  Charles  became  resi 
dent  agent  of  the  United  States  in  Egypt  in 
1864,  he  found  that  he  had  quite  a  number  of 
these  queer  "  Americans  "  on  his  hands,  none  of 
whom  had  ever  seen  America  and  none  of  whom 
could  speak  a  word  of  English.1  If  they  got 
into  trouble  they  came  to  our  consuls  to  protect 
them,  and  they  could  not  be  tried  in  any  but  a 
consular  court.  My  brother  asked  me  to  look 
up  Eaton's  history  for  him.  I  found  that  all  the 

1  Charles  wrote  me  while  he  resided  in  Egypt  that  he  had 
the  day  before  sat  as  judge  in  a  trial  of  an  "  American,"  who 
had  been  stealing  in  the  Egyptian  post-office.  "  The  man  spoke 
Arabic;  the  witnesses  testified  in  Arabic,  Turkish,  and  Coptic; 
the  lawyers  on  both  sides  conducted  their  pleas  in  Italian,  and 
I  decided  the  case  in  French."  The  only  language  of  which 
not  one  word  was  spoken  by  any  accident  was  the  language  of 
the  country  to  which  the  judge  and  the  case  belonged. 

My  brother  redeemed  all  this  system  of  trials  from  this 
absurdity.  He  drew  up  the  plan  by  which  a  special  court 
authorized  by  the  Egyptian  Government  now  tries  all  such 
prisoners. 


64          MEMORIES    OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

papers  which  Eaton  considered  important  had 
been  preserved,  and  from  them  I  was  able  to 
read  the  very  curious  history  of  the  episode 
which  it  was  convenient  for  Jefferson  to  have 
forgotten,  and  which  has  won  for  itself  so  little 
place  in  the  history  of  the  century.  People  who 
negotiated  the  treaty  with  the  Pasha  of  Tripoli 
say  definitely  that  the  attack  on  the  eastern 
side  of  the  province  was  an  efficient  agency  in 
bringing  the  autocratic  Pasha  to  terms. 

I  wonder  how  many  of  the  thousands  of 
people  who  pass  through  Derne  Street  in  Boston 
every  day,  now  that  it  makes  one  side  of  the 
beautiful  State  House  Park,  know  that  it  cele 
brates  the  only  conquest  of  their  country  on 
either  of  the  three  old  continents ! 

Partly  from  ignorance  and  partly  from  the 
old-fashioned  etiquettes,  the  arrangements  which 
John  Adams  or  his  cabinet  made  for  a  war  with 
France  are  singularly  slurred  over  by  most  of 
the  historians.  It  is  rather  droll  to  think  or 
speak  of  President  Adams  as  the  first  of  "  fili 
busters."  But  that  is  just  what  he  was.  Un 
willingly  enough,  he  had  made  Hamilton  the 
commander  of  the  army  under  Washington.  Of 
the  intrigues  attending  this  appointment  there 
is  enough  and  more  than  enough  in  the  older 


PHILIP   NOLAN  65 

histories.  What  they  do  not  tell  us  is,  that  the 
infant  town  of  Cincinnati  was  made  the  gather 
ing  point  for  the  new  regiments  and  that  Hamil 
ton  expected,  wished,  or  meant  to  lead  the  army 
which  was  recruiting  there  down  the  river  to 
the  capture  of  "  Orleans  "  and  to  cooperate  with 
General  Miranda  in  his  proposed  overthrow  of 
the  Spanish  rule  on  the  southern  side  of  the 
Gulf  of  Mexico  and  the  Caribbean  Sea.  The 
flatboats  which  were  to  take  this  expedition 
down  the  river  were  built  in  Cincinnati.  Hamil 
ton  and  Wilkinson  were  in  full  correspondence 
as  to  its  details  when  the  peace  was  made  with 
France.  Observe,  that  Orleans  was  then  a  Span 
ish  town  and  that  it  was  to  be  captured  by  an 
American  force  because  America  was  at  war 
with  France.  I  saw  Hamilton's  letters  in  Wil 
kinson's  chest  in  April,  1876.  But  there  is  not 
a  word  about  this  plan  in  Schouler's  history, 
hardly  an  allusion  to  it  in  Hildreth,  and  you 
have  to  come  down  to  Lodge's  "  Life  of  Hamil 
ton"  in  1882  before  you  find  its  importance 
alluded  to. 

PHILIP  NOLAN 

I  return  to  the  history  of  Philip  Nolan,  be 
cause,  as  it  proved,  it  worked  its  way  in  to  that 
hatred  of  Spain  in  the  West,  and  particularly  in 


VOL.  I.  — F 


66          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

the  southwest,  of  which  we  have  seen  the  out 
come  in  our  own  time.  As  the  reader  knows, 
the  first  explorer  of  Texas  was  Philip  Nolan. 
And  it  was  there  that  he  was  killed  on  the  22d 
day  of  March,  1801.  The  Spanish  Governor  of 
Chihuahua  who  took  out  his  overwhelming  force 
against  a  little  army  of  twenty  men  hunting 
horses,  was  one  of  the  Spanish  officers  who  had 
been  frightened  to  death.  Nolan  himself  had 
written  as  early  as  1797,  "  I  look  forward  to  the 
conquest  of  Mexico  by  the  United  States,  and  I 
expect  that  my  friend  and  patron  the  General 
will  in  such  event  give  me  a  conspicuous  com 
mand."  This  was  at  the  time  when  our  troubles 
with  France  were  brewing.  John  Adams  was 
in  the  first  year  of  his  Presidency ;  Washington 
was  to  be  really  commander-in-chief  of  the  army, 
but  Hamilton  was  to  take  command  of  what  was 
eventually  called  "  The  New  Army  "  at  Cincin 
nati.  These  details  were  probably  not  deter 
mined  on  when  Nolan  wrote  those  words,  but 
the  plan  was  in  the  air,  in  1798.  A  considerable 
part  of  the  new  army  gathered  at  Cincinnati 
which  they  called  Fort  Washington.  Had  Mi 
randa's  plans  worked  better,  Hamilton  and  Wil 
kinson  would  probably  have  captured  "  Orleans  " 
with  this  western  army,  when  in  1799,  the  high 


PHILIP   NOLAN  67 

water  of  the  Mississippi  brought  them  down. 
The  letters  between  Hamilton  and  Wilkinson 
which  I  read  in  1876  went  into  all  the  details 
of  this  plan.  It  was  abandoned  because  England 
was  so  slow  in  giving  any  support  to  Miranda. 

The  real  history  of  the  real  Philip  Nolan  is 
this.  He  seems  to  have  grown  up  as  a  boy  in 
Frankfort  or  Lexington,  Kentucky.  Lexington 
was  one  of  the  oldest  towns  in  Kentucky  and 
Frankfort  is  the  capital  of  the  state.  One  of 
my  friends  there  has  sent  me  a  photograph  of 
the  old  Court  House  which  I  suppose  was  in 
existence  in  Nolan's  time.  The  well-known 
story  is  that  the  first  settlers  of  Lexington 
named  their  town  because  they  had  just  heard 
of  the  Battle  of  Lexington  in  1775.  If,  as  I 
suppose,  Captain  Nolan  was  about  thirty-five 
when  he  was  killed,  he  must  have  been  born 
before  the  settlement ;  but  his  father  was  among 
the  early  settlers  of  the  state  and  I  think  he 
must  have  spent  his  boyhood  there. 

At  an  early  age,  however,  he  turns  up  in 
"  Orleans "  and  is  evidently  a  person  of  some 
importance  in  the  affairs  of  the  little  city.  Since 
1763  Louisiana  had  been  a  Spanish  possession, 
having  been  transferred  from  France  to  Spain  in 
the  treaties  at  the  end  of  the  Seven  Years'  War. 


68          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

But  the  reader  must  observe  that  it  was  not 
transferred  to  the  Spanish  "  Department  of  the 
Colonies."  On  this  misfortune  hung  poor  Nolan's 
life,  as  it  proved. 

For  the  Spanish  Governor  at  "  Orleans  "  was 
named  by  the  Department  of  "  Foreign  Affairs  " 
at  Madrid.  I  think  he  did  not  even  report  to  the 
viceroy  in  Mexico,  and  it  would  seem  as  if  there 
were  a  jealousy  between  the  Colonial  Bureau 
and  the  "Foreign  Affairs"  at  Madrid.  Now 
Mexico  and  Texas  belonged  to  the  "  Colonial 
Affairs,"  sometimes  called  the  "  Department  of 
the  Indies,"  and  Louisiana  with  "  Orleans "  to 
the  "  Foreign  Affairs." 

Here  was  Philip  Nolan  then,  a  young  Ameri 
can,  resident  in  "  Orleans "  at  the  time  of  the 
Spanish  Governors  Casa  Calvo  and  De  Nava. 
Orleans  was  the  port  of  the  whole  Mississippi 
Valley,  and  there  were  many  Americans  there. 
Daniel  Clark  was  there,  Mrs.  General  Gaines's 
father.  Oliver  Pollock  was  there,  —  the  same 
Pollock  who  sent  to  Pittsburg  powder  for  Wash 
ington  as  early  as  1775.  And  now  and  then 
General  James  Wilkinson  was  there.  All  of 
these  men  knew  Philip  Nolan,  and  there  is  some 
trace  of  him  in  their  correspondence.  He  wrote 
a  good  hand,  as  the  reader  may  see.  He  spelled 


PHILIP   NOLAN  69 

well,  and  a  generation  earlier  this  qualification 
seemed  to  Harriet  Byron  to  show  that  a  man 
was  a  gentleman.  He  was  in  good  society,  and 
in  the  year  1800  he  married  into  the  family  of  Mr. 
Miner,  one  of  the  best  American  families  on  the 
river.  He  is  always  spoken  of  with  great  respect, 
almost  with  regard.  I  am  sorry  to  say  that  his 
personal  appearance  does  not  appear  to  corrobo 
rate  the  impression  thus  given.  Mr.  Miner  once 
showed  me  a  miniature  of  him,  elegantly  set  in 
gold,  which  represents  rather  a  disagreeable  bluff 
face,  apparently  Irish,  of  a  man  about  thirty. 
He  is  dressed  in  the  picture  in  a  blue  coat,  which 
may  have  been  a  soldier's  coat.  He  is  generally 
called  Captain  Nolan.  But  I  cannot  find  that 
he  had  been  in  any  army.  His  correspondence 
with  Wilkinson,  so  far  as  we  have  it,  indicates  a 
good  deal  of  mercantile  experience. 

Strange  to  say,  it  was  not  considered  unbe 
coming  that  a  Major-General,  commanding  an 
army,  should  be  engaged  constantly  in  commer 
cial  enterprises  which  took  him  and  his  agents 
into  a  foreign  city.  Through  all  those  years  at 
the  end  of  the  century,  Wilkinson  was  engaged 
in  such  enterprises  in  " Orleans"  and  this  Captain 
Nolan  was  his  confidential  commercial  correspon 
dent.  If  he  had  not  been,  I  should  never  have 


70          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

cared  anything  about  him,  and  this  reader  would 
not  now  be  reading  these  lines.  But  Nolan 
was  so  engaged.  And  in  General  Wilkinson's 
"  Memoirs/'  which,  as  I  have  said,  is  a  sad  gali 
matias  of  fact  and  fiction  always  flavored  by 
fraud  and  folly,  he  refers  again  and  again  to  "  his 
friend,  Captain  Nolan."  In  particular,  whenever 
there  is  an  important  document  which  cannot  be 
found,  Wilkinson  says  it  was  lost  at  the  time  of 
the  death  of  Captain  Nolan.  Now,  as  I  have  said, 
when  I  was  writing  my  story  of  "  A  Man  with 
out  a  Country,"  in  1863, 1  wanted  a  name  for  my 
imagined  hero.  It  must  be  a  Kentucky  name,  a 
name  remembered  in  the  lower  Mississippi  Val 
ley  ;  the  man  must  know  of  Canadian  intrigues 
at  the  North,  and  Spanish  intrigues  at  the  South. 
I  recollected  Wilkinson's  friend,  —  he  is  the  sort 
of  Mrs.  Jawkins  for  Wilkinson,  — "  Captain 
Nolan  who  was  killed  in  Texas."  Here  was  a 
good  name  for  me,  and  I  called  my  "  Man  with 
out  a  Country  "  Nolan.  In  the  book  he  speaks 
once  and  again  of  "  his  cousin  "  Stephen  Nolan 
who  was  killed  in  Texas,  and  of  "  his  brother  " 
who  was  killed  in  Texas.  The  mixture  of  cousin 
and  brother  was  intentional,  by  way  of  giving 
plausibility  to  the  story,  for  the  words  are  used 
by  two  persons  and  a  mistake  in  such  a  trifle  is 


PHILIP   NOLAN  71 

not  unnatural.  All  the  time  I  had  the  impres 
sion  that  Wilkinson's  friend  was  Captain  Stephen 
Nolan,  and  I  called  him  so.  The  matter  seemed 
of  no  consequence  whatever,  and  I  did  not  think 
to  look  up  the  name.  If  he  was  named  Stephen 
his  brother  might  have  been  named  Philip.  I 
had  once  been  in  an  Episcopal  church  on  Saint 
Stephen's  Day,  when,  by  accident,  the  "  Rector  " 
told  the  story  of  Saint  Philip  and  fitted  it  on 
Saint  Stephen.  This  made  me  think  that  I 
might  fairly  name  my  man  Philip  Nolan  and 
say  he  had  a  brother  or  a  cousin  named 
Stephen. 

Alas !  and  alas  !  more  than  six  months  after 
my  story  was  printed,  indeed  when  hundreds 
of  thousands  of  copies  of  it  had  introduced  my 
Philip  Nolan  to  the  world,  as  I  was  looking 
in  Wilkinson's  "  Memoirs "  for  something  else, 
I  found  to  my  horror  and  dismay  that  the  real 
man  was  named  Philip  and  not  Stephen ! 

This  accounted  at  once  for  many  things.  I 
had  had  a  message  from  a  lady  who  said  she 
was  a  sister  of  Philip  Nolan  and  wished  she 
knew  more  about  him.  Our  army  was  in 
possession  of  New  Orleans  at  that  time.  It 
was  a  little  after  the  fall  of  Vicksburg.  The 
Miner  family  and  gentlemen  interested  in  the 


72          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

early  history  of  Louisiana  had  been  writing  to 
me  about  Captain  Nolan  who  had  been  killed 
at  Waco  in  1801,  as  if  he  were  Philip  Nolan 
who  appears  in  my  story  for  the  first  time  in 
the  summer  of  1805. 

I  am  sorry  to  say  that  Captain  Philip  Nolan, 
who,  on  the  whole,  I  like  and  believe  in,  was 
the  correspondent,  in  some  sense  the  confiden 
tial  correspondent,  of  his  "  patron "  General 
Wilkinson.  But  there  is  no  evidence  that  he 
knew  of  Wilkinson's  relations  with  the  Span 
ish  King.  The  reader  should  recollect  that  for 
a  part  of  this  time,  New  Orleans  and  Louisiana 
were  Spanish  territory,  and  that  a  Spanish 
Governor  held  the  city  of  Orleans  and  that 
neighborhood  for  the  Spanish  King.  Now  in 
truth  the  real  Philip  Nolan  had  found  out,  I 
do  not  know  how,  that  there  were  herds  of 
wild  horses  in  Texas.  He  could  see  with  his 
eyes  that  the  Spanish  soldiers  in  Louisiana 
needed  horses.  He  went  to  the  Spanish  Gov 
ernor  and  told  him  that  if  the  Government 
would  take  from  him  as  many  horses  as  were 
wanted  and  would  give  him  a  permit  for  the 
purpose,  he  would  organize  a  mounted  party 
and  bring  horses  from  Texas  to  Orleans.  The 
governor  was  well  pleased,  made  the  contract, 


PHILIP   NOLAN  73 

gave  the  permit,  and  Nolan  with  a  party  went 
up  into  the  Red  River  and  beyond,  corralled 
the  horses,  brought  them  into  Orleans,  and 
was  paid  for  them.  It  was  a  good  speculation 
for  all  parties. 

It  was  so  successful  that  another  year  Nolan 
did  it  again;  for  the  Governor  made  a  second 
contract,  gave  a  permit  a  second  time,  and 
Nolan  brought  in  another  drove  of  horses.  I 
think  that  Wilkinson  was  concerned  in  the 
pecuniary  part  of  one  of  these  adventures.  I 
know  that  Nolan  says  in  one  of  his  letters 
that  General  Wilkinson  had  promised  him  a 
commission  if  the  United  States  ever  made 
war  with  the  Spaniards.  It  was  at  this  time 
that  Jefferson,  who  was  then  Vice-President  of 
the  United  States,  heard  of  him,  and  wrote  him 
a  letter  about  these  wild  horses.  A  press  copy 
of  this  letter  is  now  at  Washington.  We  know 
that  Nolan  replied  to  this  letter,  —  but  his  reply 
cannot  now  be  found  in  the  correspondence  of 
the  American  Philosophical  Society,  for  whom 
Jefferson  wrote.  There  is,  however,  another 
paper  by  him  on  the  sign  language  of  the 
Indians.  I  used  that  language,  therefore,  in  my 
novel  of  "  Philip  Nolan's  Friends." 

At  that  time,  or  about  that  time,  Nolan  estab- 


74          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

lished  his  residence  in  or  near  the  infant  town  of 
Natchez.  Here  he  married  Miss  Fanny  Lintot. 
By  this  marriage  he  was  connected  with  Mr. 
Miner,  and  to  Mr.  Miner  and  the  ladies  of  his 
family  I  am  indebted  for  much  of  my  informa 
tion  in  regard  to  him.  Dr.  Dinet  of  Temple  in 
Texas  tells  me  that  it  was  while  he  lived  in 
Natchez,  in  1799,  that  he  published  a  description 
of  Texas,  the  first  written  in  English,  and 
printed  it  at  Natchez.  Alas !  no  copy  of  this 
interesting  tract  is  known  to  exist.  But  the 
map  which  Nolan  drew  for  it  has  been  copied 
in  Bulletin  No.  45  of  the  U.  S.  Geological  Survey. 

Poor  Nolan  tried  the  adventure  in  Texas  once 
too  often.  At  the  end  of  1800  the  Spanish 
Governor,  De  Nava,  —  the  same  who  had  given 
him  his  passports  before,  was  acting  as  Governor 
ad  interim.  He  wanted  horses  again.  Nolan 
again  agreed  to  go  and  bring  him  some.  And 
again  he  received  authority  from  the  Government 
to  go.  But  let  tne  reader  remember  that  this  is 
a  governor  appointed  by  the  Spanish  Foreign 
Office  and  not  by  the  Colonial  Office,  and  while 
the  Foreign  Office  has  the  oversight  of  Louisiana, 
the  Colonial  Office  is  responsible  for  Texas. 

Nolan  enlisted  his  men,  about  twenty  of  them. 
We  have  the  names  of  all  of  them.  They  went 


PHILIP   NOLAN  75 

up  as  far  as  Walnut  Hills,  where  they  were  in 
American  territory;  and  here  Nolan  was  sum 
moned  by  the  United  States  officer  in  command, 
who  did  not  propose  that  an  American  body  of 
men  should  go  filibustering  into  Spanish  terri 
tory.  As  soon  as  they  crossed  the  Mississippi, 
they  would  be  on  Spanish  soil.  Nolan  answered 
with  perfect  frankness.  He  showed  his  permit 
from  the  Spanish  Governor.  It  was  put  on 
record  in  the  United  States  court.  The  United 
States  authorities  saw  that  things  were  all  right, 
and  he  and  his  friends  crossed  the  river  and 
entered  upon  Spanish  ground. 

I  suppose  that  it  was  at  this  time  that  he  saw 
his  wife  for  the  last  time.  In  1876  I  saw  an 
old  white-haired  negro  on  Mr.  Miner's  planta 
tion  who  as  a  child  had  seen  the  cortege  depart. 
The  old  man  told  me  he  remembered  bidding 
Captain  Phil  good-by. 

My  friend,  Mr.  William  Howell  Reed,  had  told 
me  in  1864,  that  near  City  Point  in  Virginia  he 
had  seen  the  grave  of  Philip  Nolan,  a  black 
soldier  of  a  Louisiana  regiment,  which  had  been 
brought  from  Louisiana  as  our  army  advanced 
upon  Richmond.  I  suppose  that  he  had  been 
born  on  the  Miner  plantation,  and  that  his  name 
may  have  been  borrowed  from  our  Captain 


76          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

Nolan,  or  from  his  son  who  was  born  after  his 
death. 

My  story  of  "  The  Man  without  a  Country,"  of 
which  my  Philip  Nolan  was  the  hero,  was  pub 
lished  in  December,  1863.  When  Grant's  army 
entered  Jackson,  in  Mississippi,  in  the  same  year, 
an  officer  of  an  Ohio  regiment  went  into  the 
State  House.  Among  some  loose  papers  there, 
he  found  the  original  record  of  the  real  Captain 
Nolan's  examination  by  the  United  States 
authorities  to  which  I  have  referred.  The 
reader  must  observe  that  at  that  time  this 
gentleman  knew  nothing  of  my  Captain  Nolan, 
because  my  story  was  not  printed  till  many 
months  after.  When  my  story  was  printed,  a 
gentleman  in  our  army  sent  that  number  of  the 
Atlantic  Monthly  to  the  ladies  of  Mr.  Miner's 
family  who  were  living  at  Concordia,  just  oppo 
site  Natchez.  As  Miss  Miner  advanced  in  the 
story  she  cried  out  in  deep  excitement  that  she 
had  found  "  A  story  about  Uncle  Philip  Nolan. " 
For  Fanny  Lintot,  Captain  Nolan's  wife,  was 
this  lady's  grandaunt,  and  the  wedding  had 
taken  place  in  the  Concordia  of  that  day.  The 
Concordia  of  the  next  century,  which  entertained 
in  its  time  Lafayette  and  Aaron  Burr  and  every 
body  else  of  distinction  who  passed  that  way,  has 


PHILIP   NOLAN  77 

been  unfortunately  burned  down  since  the  publi 
cation  of  these  papers  began. 

To  return  to  the  real  Captain  Nolan.  He 
and  his  merry  men  bade  good-by  to  Fanny  Lin- 
tot  and  the  rest,  and  rode  gayly  up  the  valley  of 
the  Red  River,  stopping,  I  believe,  at  Nachitoches, 
where  I  think  he  was  examined  again  by  the 
Spanish  Governor.  He  had  lived  in  Nachitoches 
at  one  time  and  another.  I  have  the  original 
record  in  Spanish  of  a  judicial  inquiry  made  by 
Spanish  officers  in  which  his  washerwoman  and 
her  husband  and  everybody  else,  you  might  say, 
is  cross  questioned  about  Captain  Nolan.  Poor 
Nolan  was  dead  before  the  inquiry  was  over; 
but  this  they  did  not  know.  My  friend,  Judge 
Emery,  was  good  enough  to  translate  this  narra 
tive  for  me,  and  the  Mississippi  Historical  Society 
has  printed  his  translation.  If  Nolan  did  show 
his  passports  at  Nachitoches,  they  were  still  all 
right ;  for  all  of  them  were  still  under  the 
dominion  of  the  Spanish  Foreign  Office.  But 
Texas  begins  some  fifty  miles  west  of  Nachi 
toches.  As  soon  as  Nolan  crossed  the  Sabine 
into  Texas,  he  was  under  the  dominion  of  the 
viceroy  of  Mexico,  and  the  Governor  appointed 
by  him,  and  here  danger  began. 

Of  this  whole  journey,  we  have  the  story  in 


78          MEMORIES   OF   A  HUNDRED   YEARS 

a  good  deal  of  detail  by  Ellis  Bean,  one  of  his 
men.  This  story  is  reprinted  in  "  Yoakum's 
History  of  Texas."  Here  is  the  narrative  by 
Bean :  — 

"  In  four  days  more  it  was  our  misfortune  to 
be  attacked  by  a  hundred  and  fifty  Spaniards 
sent  by  the  commandant  at  Chihuahua.  He 
was  general  commandant  of  the  five  northeast 
ern  internal  provinces,  and  called  Don  Nimesio 
de  Salcedo.  The  troops  that  came  were  piloted 
by  Indians  from  Nacogdoches  that  came  with 
them.  They  surrounded  our  camp  about  one 
o'clock  in  the  morning,  on  the  22nd  of  March, 
1801.  They  took  the  five  Spaniards  and  one 
American  that  were  guarding  our  horses,  leav 
ing  but  twelve  of  us,  including  Caesar.  We  were 
all  alarmed  by  the  tramping  of  their  horses  ; 
and,  as  day  broke,  without  speaking  a  word, 
they  commenced  their  fire.  After  about  ten 
minutes  our  gallant  leader  Nolan  was  slain  by 
a  musket-ball  which  hit  him  in  the  head.  In 
a  few  minutes  after  they  began  to  fire  grape- 
shot  at  us :  they  had  brought  a  small  swivel  on 
a  mule.  We  had  a  pen  that  we  had  built  of 
logs,  to  prevent  the  Indians  from  stealing  from 
us.  From  this  pen  we  returned  their  fire  until 
about  nine  o'clock.  We  then  had  two  men 


PHILIP   NOLAN  79 

wounded  and  one  killed.  I  told  niy  companions 
we  ought  to  charge  on  the  cannon  and  take  it. 
Two  or  three  of  them  agreed  to  it,  but  the  rest 
appeared  unwilling.  I  told  them  it  was  at  most 
but  death ;  and  if  we  stood  still,  all  would  doubt 
less  be  killed ;  that  we  must  take  the  cannon  or 
retreat.  It  was  agreed  that  we  should  retreat. 
Our  number  was  eleven,  of  which  two  were 
wounded.  The  powder  that  we  could  not  put 
in  our  horns  was  given  to  Caesar  to  carry,  while 
the  rest  were  to  make  use  of  their  arms.  So  we 
set  out  through  a  prairie,  and  shortly  crossed  a 
small  creek.  While  we  were  defending  our 
selves,  Caesar  stopped  at  the  creek  and  sur 
rendered  himself  with  the  ammunition  to  the 
enemy.  Of  the  two  wounded  men,  one  stopped 
and  gave  himself  up,  the  other  came  on  with  us. 
There  were  then  nine  of  us  that  stood  the  fire  of 
the  enemy,  on  both  sides  of  us,  for  a  march  of 
half  a  mile.  We  were  so  fortunate,  that  not  a 
man  of  us  got  hurt,  though  the  balls  played 
around  us  like  hail." 

The  next  day,  however,  they  surrendered  to 
their  pursuers  and  were  marched  to  Nacog- 
doches ;  but  after  a  month,  when  they  were  ex 
pecting  to  be  sent  home,  they  were  sent  to  San 
Antonio,  then  to  San  Luis  Potosi,  where  they 


80          MEMORIES  OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

stayed  one  year  and  four  months,  then  to  Chi 
huahua,  where  they  lived  for  many  years.  A 
regular  trial  was  given  them,  of  which  the  pro 
ceedings  are  extant.  Don  Pedro  Ramos  de  Yerea 
conducted  the  defence  (will  not  some  Texan 
name  a  county  for  him  ?)  and  the  men  were  ac 
quitted.  The  judge,  De  Yavaro,  ordered  their 
release,  January  23,  1804  ;  but  Salcedo,  who 
was  then  in  command  of  these  provinces,  coun 
termanded  the  decree  of  acquittal,  and  sent  the 
papers  to  the  King  in  Spain. 

The  King,  by  a  decree  of  February  23,  1807, 
ordered  that  one  out  of  five  of  Nolan's  men 
should  be  hung,  and  the  others  kept  at  hard 
labor  for  ten  years.  Let  it  be  observed  that  this 
is  the  royal  decree  for  ten  men  who  had  been 
acquitted  by  the  court  which  tried  them. 

When  the  decree  arrived  at  Chihuahua,  one  of 
the  ten  prisoners,  Pierce,  was  dead.  The  new 
judge  pronounced  that  only  one  of  the  remaining 
nine  should  suffer  death,  and  Salcedo  approved 
this  decision. 

On  the  9th  of  November,  therefore,  1807,  the 
adjutant-inspector,  with  De  Yerea,  the  prisoner's 
counsel,  proceeded  to  the  barracks,  where  they 
were  confined,  and  read  the  King's  decision.  A 
drum,  a  glass  tumbler,  and  two  dice  were 


PHILIP   NOLAN  81 

brought,  the  prisoners  knelt   before    the  drum, 
and  were  blindfolded. 

Ephraim  Blackburn,  the  oldest  prisoner,  took  the  fatal 

glass  and  dice,  and  threw  3  and  1 =    4 

Lucian  Garcia  threw  3  and  4 =    7 

Joseph  Reed  threw  6  and  5 =  11 

David  Fero  threw  5  and  3 =    8 

Solomon  Cooley  threw  6  and  5 =  11 

Jonah  (Tony)  Walters  threw  6  and  1 =     7 

Charles  Ring  threw  4  and  3 =     7 

Ellis  Bean  threw  4  and  1 =     5 

William  Dawlin  threw  4  and  2 =     6 

And  then  and  there  poor  Ephraim  Blackburn 
was  led  out  and  hanged  in  the  sight  of  the 
others.  Blackburn  is,  I  am  told,  a  Virginian 
name,  —  and  I  made  some  effort  once  to  find 
the  family  to  which  this  poor  martyr  belonged, 
but  without  success. 

Only  a  few  months  before  this  Zebulon  Pike, 
an  officer  of  our  army  who  had  accidentally 
crossed  the  Spanish  frontier  in  his  explorations 
of  our  Western  territory,  fell  in  with  Fero,  one 
of  these  men,  with  old  Caesar,  another  of  them, 
and  had  some  communication  with  a  third. 
Pike  was  so  much  interested  in  them  that  he 
wrote  a  letter  to  General  Salcedo,  the  commander 
of  the  department  of  which  Chihuahua  was  the 
capital.  He  begged  that  something  might  be 

VOL.   I. — Q 


82          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

done  toward  "  restoring  those  poor  fellows  to 
their  liberty,  their  friends  and  country  "  ;  and  he 
intercedes  particularly  for  Fero  who  had  served 
under  Pike's  father.  In  this  letter  to  Salcedo, 
Pike  says  that  they  entered  the  territory  of  the 
Spanish  in  a  clandestine  manner,  in  violation  of 
the  treaties  between  the  two  governments.  But 
he  says  "  the  men  of  the  party  were  innocent, 
believing  that  Nolan  had  passports  from  the 
Spanish  Government."  We  know  from  the 
testimony  of  the  United  States  Court  at  Natchez 
that  this  statement  of  Nolan's  to  them  was  true. 
But  unfortunately,  Salcedo,  in  the  whole  of  the 
business,  before  Nolan's  death  and  after  it,  had 
proved  himself  to  be  very  much  the  brute.  From 
Pike's  report,  and,  indeed,  from  every  other 
report  which  came  from  the  valley  of  the  Bio 
Grande  or  Northern  Mexico,  news  of  the  Spanish 
cruelty  to  these  poor  fellows  was  brought  to 
the  Southwest.  Anybody  who  cared  anything 
about  it,  as  the  Miners  for  instance,  into  whose 
family  Nolan  had  married,  believed,  as  I  believe, 
that  the  Spanish  authorities  at  Orleans  had  given 
Nolan  a  passport  to  go  into  Texas.  But  the 
curse  of  red  tape,  which  seems  a  small  curse, 
was  upon  Spain,  as  it  always  has  been  since  the 
days  of  Spartacus.  As  has  been  intimated,  Texas 


PHILIP   NOLAN  83 

was  under  the  control  of  the  Department  of  the 
Indies,  which  had  no  more  to  do  with  the  Depart 
ment  of  State  than  it  had  to  do  with  the  depart 
ment  of  canals  in  the  planet  Mars.  Whatever 
one  department  ordered,  the  other  department 
blocked  if  it  could,  as  is  the  manner  of  "  depart 
ments/'  and  so  poor  Philip  Nolan  was  killed  by 
the  Governor  of  Texas,  though  he  had  the  per 
mission  of  the  Governor  of  Louisiana  to  go  into 
Texas.  The  Southwest,  however,  charged  this 
cruelty,  not  to  red  tape,  but  to  Spanish  falsity 
and  treachery.  And  the  blood  of  Philip  Nolan 
and  Ephraim  Blackburn  became,  as  I  believe, 
the  seed  which,  when.it  ripened,  fed  the  various 
assaults  upon  Texas  that  separated  Texas  from 
the  Mexican  confederacy.  It  is  for  this  reason 
that  I  am  always  trying  to  urge  my  friends  in 
Texas  to  erect  a  statue  to  Philip  Nolan,  either 
in  the  beautiful  capitol  of  their  own  State,  or 
in  the  gallery  of  heroes  in  Washington. 

Of  this  infamy,  as  it  now  seems,  from  every 
written  document  of  the  time,  the  greater  part 
transpired  in  the  first  eight  years  of  the  century; 
the  years  of  Jefferson's  administration.  Jeffer 
son  had  himself,  as  we  have  seen,  been  a  corre 
spondent  of  Captain  Nolan's,  had  written  to  him, 
and  had  received  his  answers.  Nolan,  with 


84          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

nearly  twenty  other  Americans,  who  carried  the 
permission  of  a  Spanish  Governor,  had  been 
treated  in  this  way  by  the  Spanish  Government. 
Jefferson  must  have  known  of  the  transaction. 
Pike  must  have  reported  to  him  what  he  saw 
and  heard.  Yet  it  would  appear  that  he  never 
uttered  a  word  for  the  freedom  of  these  men 
or  made  any  inquiries  regarding  them. 

Another  man  would  have  had  something  to 
say  to  Godoy.  Any  President  of  the  United 
States  to-day  who  should  neglect  such  a  matter 
would  be  impeached.  But  Jefferson,  till  he  died, 
was  let  alone. 

All  the  same,  there  were  twenty  households  of 
Americans  which  had  sent  out,  each  one  young 
man,1  to  be  the  victims  of  this  cruelty.  From 
year  to  year  there  trickled  back  messages  from 
Fero,  from  Blackburn,  from  Bean,  and  the 
rest,  which  told  of  the  fate  of  these  wretched 
slaves,  whose  number  was  smaller  and  smaller. 
Such  stories  passed  from  house  to  house,  and 
from  village  to  village.  And  so  there  grew  up 
in  the  Southwest  a  vindictive  hatred  of  Spain 
which  showed  itself  as  soon  as  the  struggles  for 
Mexican  independence  began. 

1  De  Nava's  successor,  in  his  letters  home,  says  thirty-two, 
but  I  do  not  know  why.  Bean  gives  the  names  of  his  twenty. 


PHILIP    NOLAN  85 

The  Spain  which  broke  faith  with  John  Haw 
kins  in  1567,  which  poisoned  Delaware  and  his 
companions  at  Madeira  in  1611,  which  had 
hanged  the  Huguenots  on  the  coast  of  Florida ; 
the  Spain  of  the  Inquisition;  the  Spain  of 
Pizarro  and  of  Cortes,  was  the  same  Spain  to 
the  friends  of  Philip  Nolan  and  his  companions 
when  the  century  began.  When  in  1870  a 
Spanish  Governor  shot  seventy  passengers  from 
the  Virginius  in  Santiago  without  even  the  form 
of  a  trial,  those  men  in  the  Southwest  said, 
"  This  is  the  same  old  Spain  !  "  When  in  1897 
Weyler  committed  worse  atrocities,  these  people 
said,  "  It  is  the  same  old  Spain." 

We  in  the  North  could  not  conceive  of  this. 
To  us,  Spain  was  the  Spain  of  Isabella  II,  our 
true  friend  in  the  Kebellion ;  the  Spain  of 
Gayangos,  of  Navarrete,  of  Irving,  of  Cervantes 
and  Gil  Bias ;  the  Spain  of  Sancho  Panza  and 
of  Don  Quixote.  We  did  not  hate  Spain.  But 
the  people  of  the  Southwest  did.  To  them, 
Spain  was  the  Spain  of  murder,  of  fraud,  and 
of  violated  promise. 

And  so  the  mills  of  the  gods  ground  in  their 
time.  Those  mills  grind  slowly,  but  they  grind 
exceeding  fine. 


86 


MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 


AARON  BURR 

When  I  was  preparing  myself  to  write  the 
story  of  "  The  Man  Without"  a  Country,"  which 
has  been  alluded  to,  I  went  as  carefully  as  I 
could  into  the  history  of  Aaron  Burr,  and  what 

is  called  his  Plot, 
winding  up  with  the 
great  Treason  Trial 
at  Richmond. 

I  satisfied  myself 
that  there  is  more 
to  be  learned  about 
it  than  any  one  now 
knows ;  and  I  still 
think  that  here  is  a 
good  unexplored  field 
of  work  for  any  wide 
awake  young  man 
or  woman  who  really 
cares  for  the  history 
of  the  country.  I  also  think  that  more  important 
material  than  has  yet  been  used  by  historians 
is  to  be  found,  not  in  this  country,  but  in  the 
archives  of  Mexico;  and  probably  at  Madrid 
also.  I  should  not  attempt  any  careful  history 
of  that  business  till  I  had  been  in  Mexico  and 


AARON  BURR. 
From  the  portrait  by  Gilbert  Stuart. 


AAEON   BURR  87 

Spain,  with  permission  to  use  their  papers  of  the 
time. 

Burr  probably  had  agents,  if  you  may  call 
them  so,  in  all  our  seaports,  pressing  men  to  join 
him  somewhere,  somehow.  Of  such  agencies  of 
his  the  Spanish  Minister  at  Washington  was  well 
informed,  and  he  sent  to  Mexico,  and  I  suppose 
to  Madrid,  despatches  quite  as  highly  colored  as 
the  truth  demanded. 

I  began  to  wonder,  very  soon  in  my  researches, 
why  Burr  was  so  carefully  let  alone  by  Jefferson 
in  1805  and  1806,  and  was  then  pursued  with 
such  intense  hatred  in  1807.  Was  there  not, 
perhaps,  at  bottom  in  Mr.  Jefferson's  heart,  a 
suspicion  that  Burr  would  be  well  out  of  the 
way,  either  if  he  succeeded  in  establishing  his 
principality,  or  if  he  were  killed  in  battle,  or  if 
he  were  halved  and  quartered  by  the  Spaniards  ? 

Recollect  that  Jefferson  knew  what  they  had 
done  to  Nolan  and  his  men,  and  that  Nolan's 
men  were  slaving  in  the  mines  of  New  Mexico. 
With  this  suspicion  I  went  over  the  correspond 
ence  now  at  Washington  as  well  as  I  could,  only 
to  find  that,  yes  or  no,  whatever  Mr.  Jefferson 
knew  or  did  not  know,  he  covered  his  own  tracks 
very  carefully.  There  is  nothing  in  the  Jeffer 
son  papers  or  the  papers  from  our  Minister  in 


88          MEMORIES  OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

Madrid  —  nothing  at  all.  You  may  read  the 
correspondence  and  hardly  know  that  there  was 
any  Aaron  Burr. 

The  reader  will  thank  me  for  copying  Jeffer 
son's  very  curious  letter  to  Burr  as  early  as  1800, 
December  15,  in  which  he  natters  him  to  the 
top  of  his  bent.  Yet,  after  this,  there  is,  how 
ever,  a  long  memorandum,  which  has  been 
printed,  which  is  Jefferson's  account  of  a  con 
versation  between  him  and  Burr  in  January, 
1802,  not  quite  a  year  after  their  inauguration. 
Burr  is  profuse  in  his  protestations  of  loyalty  to 
Jefferson.  Jefferson  is  cold,  scornful  almost,  in 
his  account  of  his  replies.  It  is  clear  enough 
that  from  that  time  there  could  have  been 
nothing  approaching  intimacy  between  them. 

In  this  conversation  Burr  said  that  New  York 
was  in  the  hands  of  two  great  families,  the 
Clintons  and  the  Livingstons ;  and  that  his 
loyalty  to  Jefferson  had  lost  to  him  the  confi 
dence  of  both.  This  is  an  interesting  sug 
gestion  to  any  one  who  cares  to  study  the 
"unaccountable"  in  New  York  politics.  It 
goes  deep  in  the  history  of  National  politics 
for  sixty  years.1 

1  In  the  canvass  of  1828-1829  John  Quincy  Adams  made  the 
remark,  which  I  believe  I  first  put  in  print,  that  in  political 
matters  "New  York  always  was  one  of  the  devil's  own  un- 
accountables." 


AARON   BURR  91 

If  I  were  twenty  years  younger  than  I  am, 
and  if  by  good  fortune  there  were  eight  days  in 
the  week  for  some  half-year,  I  think  I  would 
write  the  life  of  Aaron  Burr  from  1795,  perhaps, 
to  1810.  No  one  else  will  do  it.  I  observe, 
however,  that  in  the  flood  of  historical  novels 
there  are  one  or  two  which  deal  with  him.  But, 
historically,  now  that  Mr.  Parton  is  dead,  nobody 
cares  anything  about  him.1 

It  is  a  most  picturesque,  dramatic,  and  mysteri 
ous  life.  Sometimes  one  wonders  whether,  in 
his  own  mind,  after  it  was  all  over,  there  re 
mained  any  very  distinct  plan  of  what  he  was 
about  or  what  he  was  trying  for.  It  seems  to 
me  very  queer  that,  living  until  the  year  1836, 
he  did  not  himself  prepare  a  monograph  which 
should  tell  at  least  what  he  pretended  it  was. 

From  1795  to  1800  he  was  a  prominent  New 
York  politician.  He  went  and  came  with  no 
fundamental  theory  of  government,  I  think, 
and  perfectly  indifferent  as  to  the  questions  of 
the  day  so  only  Aaron  Burr  was  at  the  top  and 

1  After  I  printed  these  words  in  December,  1901,  I  learned 
from  Mr.  Charles  Felton  Pidgin  that  he  proposes  "to  write 
several  books  in  which  Aaron  Burr  will  be  a  conspicuous  fig 
ure,"  and  "  that  he  intends  to  close  the  series  with  a  life  of 
Colonel  Burr."  Mr.  Pidgin  is  Councillor-in-chief  and  Corre- 
spondent-in-chief  of  "  The  Aaron  Burr  Legion." 


92  MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

other  people  were  not  at  the  top.  Certainly  one 
or  two  analyses  made  by  Burr  himself  of  the 
political  quarrels  of  that  day  in  New  York  add 
very  little  to  our  light  on  the  subject.  I  do  not 
believe  that  there  now  lingers  in  the  State  of 
New  York  any  "  silver-gray  politician,"  or  any 
body  else,  who  knows  or  cares  why  faction  was 
divided  against  faction  as  it  was. 

As  the  reader  knows,  the  Federalist  party  in 
Congress  had  determined  to  take  its  chances  and 
elect  Aaron  Burr  to  the  Presidency.  It  had 
failed,  and  Jefferson  became  President.  With 
that  election  it  was  determined  that  the  South 
ern  influence  should,  on  the  whole,  prevail  in  the 
government  of  America  until  the  year  1861. 
The  administration  of  John  Quincy  Adams,  a 
month  of  William  Henry  Harrison,  and  two  or 
three  years  of  Millard  Fill  more  are  exceptions, 
so  far  as  the  names  of  the  Presidents  may  be 
taken  as  indications  of  the  National  policy. 
But  practically  the  National  administration  was 
in  Southern  hands  throughout  those  sixty  years. 
For  Martin  Van  Buren,  Franklin  Pierce,  and 
James  Buchanan  were  all  chosen  as  "  Northern 
men  with  Southern  principles,"  as  what  John 
Randolph  called  "  doughfaces,"  and  what  bitter 
partisans  called  "  putty  men."  That  is  to  say, 


AARON   BURR  93 

they  were  Northern  men  who  were  acting  under 
the  orders  of  the  Southern  party  to  the  very 
last. 

I  do  not  myself  think  that  in  1801  anybody 
in  the  country  saw  that  the  real  cleavage  line 
was  the  line  between  the  States  which  were 
virtually  free  States  and  those  States  which  were 
really  handicapped  by  the  slave  system.  In 
truth,  slavery  was  not  fairly  abolished  in  all 
the  Northern  states  at  that  time,  though  all  the 
tendencies  were  against  it.  On  the  other  hand, 
there  was  a  very  strong  anti-slavery  sentiment 
south  of  that  line,  particularly  in  the  State  of 
Virginia.  This  appears  very  distinctly  in  Jef 
ferson's  correspondence,  in  Madison's,  and  in 
Washington's. 

All  the  same,  however,  the  two  parties  of  this 
country  were  the  party  of  the  North  and  the 
party  of  the  South.  One  was  a  party  of  com 
merce  and  the  other  was  a  party  of  agriculture  ; 
one  wa,s  the  party  of  free  labor  and  the  other 
was  the  party  of  slave  labor.  When  Josiah 
Quincy,  one  of  the  fine  old  Federal  war-horses, 
was  ninety-one  years  old,  I  took  my  oldest  child 
over  to  the  town  of  Quincy  to  see  him  in  his 
country  home,  especially  that  she  might  remem 
ber  that  she  had  seen  a  man  who  was  born  be- 


94 


MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 


fore  the  American  Revolution  began.  He  was 
as  well  and  strong  as  the  youngest  man  who 
reads  this  paper.  He  was  in  capital  spirits  that 
day,  and  freely  went  over  the  history  of  America 
for  a  hundred  years.  Now,  if  you  please,  that 
day  was  just  a  century  after  the  halcyon  moment 

of  which  Wash 
ington  wrote  to  a 
friend  in  London 
that  America 
would  never  be 
heard  of  in  the 
world's  counsels 
again. 

It  was  in  the 
heart  of  the  Civil 
War,  and  I  asked 
the  old  gentle 
man  what  was 
the  first  battle 
between  the  North  and  South.  With  rage 
only  half  suppressed,  he  said  it  was  on  the 
question  between  the  Northern  States  and 
Southern  States  as  to  the  position  of  the  Fed 
eral  capital  —  Should  it  be  in  Northern  territory 
or  Southern  ?  And  very  indignant  he  was  with 
Langdon,  the  New  Hampshire  Senator  who 


JOSIAH  QUINCY. 

After  the  portrait  by  Stuart. 


AARON   BURR  95 

turned  the  scale.  He  spoke  of  Jefferson  in 
terms  as  severe  as  I  should  use  in  speaking  of 
Satan.  And,  by  the  way,  I  may  say  that  he 
intimated  that  Jefferson's  hold  of  the  Demo 
cratic  party,  which  was  of  course  always  the 
Southern  party,  did  not  virtually  cease  until  the 
strong  and  young  hand  of  John  Caldwell  Cal- 
houn  took  the  reins  from  Jefferson.  In  this 
conversation  he  cited  a  phrase  of  Gouverneur 
Morris  that  the  mistake  was  a  mistake  "  made 
at  the  beginning,  when  we  united  eight  repub 
lics  with  five  oligarchies."  In  that  phrase  of 
Morris's  is  hidden  the  political  history  of  the 
country. 

It  seems  to  have  been  almost  an  accident  that 
Aaron  Burr  should  have  been  named  with  Jef 
ferson  as  one  of  the  two  candidates  for  President 
under  the  old  Constitutional  arrangement.  But, 
as  it  happened,  he  was  the  Northern  Democrat 
of  that  decade.  At  bottom  I  suppose  that 
was  the  reason  why  the  Federal  leaders  in  Con 
gress  in  1800  and  1801  determined  to  vote  for 
him  in  the  House  of  Representatives  instead  of 
Jefferson.  Burr's  position  was,  of  course,  one 
of  the  utmost  difficulty.  As  late  as  the  16th  of 
December,  1800,  Jefferson  had,  or  said  he  had, 
absolute  confidence  in  Burr.  The  letter  which 


96 


MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 


he  wrote  to  Burr  that  day  is  still  preserved,  both 
in  the  original  and  in  the  press  copy.     The  origi 
nal  is  in  Antiquarian  Hall  in  Worcester,  Mass. 
The  critical  election  in  the  House  of  Repre- 


THE  QUINCY  MANSION  AT  QUINCY. 
From  an  early  woodcut. 

sentatives  came  on  the  eleventh  day  of  February, 
1801.  Before  that  day  Jefferson  had  lost  the 
confidence  which  he  had  expressed  in  Burr,  never 
to  resume  it  after.  Burr  had  been  chosen  Vice- 


AARON   BURR  97 

President  by  the  Senate  under  the  Constitutional 
form.  One  would  say  that  naturally  between 
the  President  and  the  Vice-President,  between 
the  years  1801  and  1805,  there  would  be  a  good 
deal  of  intimacy,  seeing  that  they  were  both 
representatives  of  the  same  great  party.  In 
point  of  fact,  however,  Jefferson  wrote  Burr 
only  two  letters  in  that  time ;  one  to  apologize 
for  cutting  open  a  letter  by  mistake,  and  the 
other  of  similar  superficial  character.  Burr, 
however,  would  not  tolerate  this  condition  of 
things,  and  sought  to  obtain  the  interview  with 
Jefferson  which  took  place,  as  I  have  said.  Jef 
ferson's  account  is  in  his  Journal,  which  has 
been  printed.  It  indicates,  all  the  way  through, 
his  distrust  of  Burr  and  his  certainty  that  Burr 
had  played  him  false  in  private  negotiations 
with  the  Federal  leaders.  But  I  do  not  believe 
that  Jefferson  was  right  in  this  opinion,  doubt 
less  sincere.  In  Matthew  Davis's  Life  of  Burr, 
which  I  will  say,  by  the  way,  is  one  of  the 
stupidest  and  worst  books  that  ever  was  written, 
he  gives  a  mass  of  testimony  which  seems  to  me 
to  prove  that  through  the  whole  critical  period 
of  the  election  in  the  House  of  Representatives 
Burr  was  loyal  to  his  chief  and  to  the  Demo 
cratic  party.  But,  all  the  same,  men  doubted 

VOL.  I.  H 


98          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

him,  and  after  the  duel  with  Hamilton  men 
hated  him.  Burr  was  never  anything  but  an 
adventurer,  and  at  the  suggestion,  as  it  would 
seem,  of  Matthew  Lyon,  he  determined  to  throw 
himself  on  the  West,  in  a  region  which  was  then 
come  into  importance.  He  made  his  first  jour 
ney  —  a  journey  highly  dramatic  —  down  to 
New  Orleans  as  soon  as  his  term  as  Vice-Presi- 
dent  ended  in  1805. 

As  I  have  said,  it  was  my  business  to  study 
this  voyage  of  Burr  down  the  Ohio  and  Missis 
sippi  Rivers  in  every  detail  which  was  accessible 
to  me.  And  very  interesting  study  it  was.  I 
do  not  myself  believe  that  at  that  time  Burr  had 
the  slightest  idea  of  any  invasion  of  Texas  or 
other  enterprise  aimed  against  the  Spanish  rule 
of  Mexico ;  but  he  met  on  that  journey  plenty 
of  people  who  hated  Spain  and  knew  what  a 
paradise  Texas  is.  It  was  not  unnatural  that, 
being  a  Vice-President  out  of  business,  he  con 
ceived  the  plan  for  the  filibustering  expedition 
on  that  journey. 

On  that  first  journey  he  met  James  Wilkin 
son,  who  was  the  General  in  command  of  what 
it  was  the  fashion  to  call  the  "  Legion  of  the 
West,"  and  I  think  that  was  its  official  title.  It 
was  suspected  even  then  that  Wilkinson  was  in 


AARON   BURR  99 

the  pay  of  the  King  of  Spain,  and  we  now  know 
from  Mr.  Gayarre's  researches  in  the  Spanish 
archives  that  Wilkinson  was  receiving  every  year 
from  the  King  of  Spain  a  subsidy  of  three  or  four 
thousand  dollars.1 

Wilkinson's  own  account  of  his  dealings  with 
Burr  is  so  evidently  the  falsehood  of  a  traitor 
and  an  intriguer  that  one  can  only  make  guesses 
about  what  really  happened ;  but  what  we  know 
is  that,  after  going  down  to  "  Orleans,"  as  New 
Orleans  was  then  called,  and  meeting  with 
Daniel  Clark  and  with  others  of  the  leading  peo 
ple  there,  Burr  came  back  to  the  East  with  the 
determination  to  try  a  filibustering  expedition, 
even  if  he  had  no  definite  plans  for  it.  This 
determination  occupied  him  when  he  arrived  in 
Washington  on  the  29th  of  November,  1805, 
and  until  August,  1806,  when  he  went  to  the 
West  and  sailed  down  the  Ohio.  Let  the  care 
ful  reader  observe  that  we  had  taken  possession 
of  Louisiana  nearly  three  years  before.  Let  him 
also  observe  that  the  whole  Southwest  hated 
Spain  with  a  hatred  which  has  lasted  until  this 
time,  of  which  the  murder  of  Philip  Nolan  and 

1  The  story  of  the  discovery  of  this  treason  is  a  curious  one, 
which  I  had  from  the  lips  of  Mr.  Gayarre  in  New  Orleans  in 
1876,  and  which  I  have  told  in  another  place. 


100        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

the  wicked  imprisonment  of  his  companions 
made  an  important  element.  Burr  had  un 
doubtedly  had  four  confidential  and  important 
interviews  with  Wilkinson  in  1805. 

NATHAN   HALE 

I  have  said  that  in  these  papers  I  am  survey 
ing  the  century  as  I  have  seen  it  myself  through 
various  keyholes. 

We  began  on  that  day  in  October  when  at  my 
grandfather's  they  killed  a  pig  in  the  morning, 
when,  as  the  day  went  on,  the  boy  Nathan  Hale 
was  called  in  from  his  work  in  the  garden  and 
was  examined  for  Williams  College.  He  joined 
his  class  after  its  first  term,  as  the  new-born 
century  began. 

So  for  me  and  mine  the  nineteenth  century 
begins  —  when  the  boy  Nathan  Hale  begins  on 
his  course  in  college.  His  father's  diary  for  the 
9th  of  February,  1801,  reads,  "  Have  several 
scholars."  On  the  10th  of  February  the  little 
diary  tells  us  that  Nathan  goes  with  Strong  and 
Taylor  and  Levi  Parsons  to  Williams  College. 

This  means  that  so  many  boys  went  with 
Dr.  Woodbridge  on  horseback  across  the  Green 
Mountain  range,  that  the  boys  might  begin  on 
their  college  course.  On  the  3d  of  March  the 


NATHAN    HALE  101 

father  wrote  a  letter  to  the  boy,  and  this  entry 
in  his  diary  may  connect  the  beginning  of  the 
century  with  the  new  era  in  the  history  of  their 
country :  "  T.  Jefferson  chosen  President  U.  S." 
For  the  next  day,  the  4th  of  March,  was  the 
day  on  which  Thomas  Jefferson  walked  from 
his  lodgings  across  to  the  half-finished  halls  of 
Congress  and  took  the  oath  as  President  of  the 
United  States.  The  reign  of  Washington  and 
Adams  was  over,  and  the  reign  of  the  Virginian 
dynasty  began. 

I  have  already  spoken  of  the  discussion  among 
the  Philotechnian  students  at  Williamstown  as 
to  the  purchase  of  Louisiana.  Dr.  Tyler,  the 
historian  of  the  College,  speaks  of  the  four  years 
after  1801  as  if  they  were  unsatisfactory.  But 
my  father  enjoyed  them,  and  always  spoke  of 
his  work  at  the  College  with  pleasure.  We  are 
so  grand  now,  and  so  apt  to  speak  as  if  the  Dark 
Ages  really  lasted  to  our  own  time,  that  it  is 
edifying  to  observe  the  subject  which  was  given 
to  him  for  discussion  at  his  Commencement, 
September  5,  1804  :  "  Has  Society  for  the  last 
fifty  years  been  in  a  state  of  progressive  im 
provement  ?  " 

This  twenty-year-old  boy,  "  without  embrac 
ing  either  extreme  of  opinion,"  proved  to  himself 


102         MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

and  to  his  fond  hearers,  I  think,  that  things  had 
gone  wonderfully  well.  He  could  speak  of  sci 
ence  with  fresh  recollections  of  Lavoisier,  Priest 
ley,  and  the  destruction  of  alchemy ;  and  he  had 
Dr.  Herschel,  who  had  doubled  the  size  of  the 
solar  system,  and  Franklin,  who  had  tamed  the 
lightning.  To  these  he  gave  four  of  his  precious 
minutes  on  Commencement  Day. 

"But  the  progress  of  the  sciences  has  been 
surpassed  by  the  improvement  of  taste  in  the 
fine  arts."  Stuart  Mill  was  yet  two  generations 
in  the  future,  but  in  1804  "we  may  claim  for 
our  own  time  the  merit  of  the  discovery  that 
syllogistical  reasoning  can  conduct  no  further 
into  the  secrets  of  science  than  the  naked  eye  of 
common  sense  could  penetrate.  This  illiberal 
attachment  to  system  and  method  has  yielded 
to  a  taste  founded  in  nature,  correct  and  un 
adulterated." 

And  so,  after  five  minutes  more,  we  come  to 
the  useful  arts,  commerce  in  particular.  There 
he  is  able  to  congratulate  his  hearers  on  the  state 
of  the  political  world.  The  year  1763  had  crip 
pled  the  house  of  Bourbon  and  extinguished  all 
fear  of  universal  empire,  and  then  the  American 
Revolution  added  an  "  extensive  and  powerful 
republic  to  the  number  of  independent  nations." 


NATHAN    HALE 


103 


We  drop  a  tear  over  poor  Poland,  but  "  sov 
ereigns  acknowledge  their  subjection  to  the  re 
straints  of  moral  obligation,  and  national  honor 
becomes  the  strong  guardian  of  national  justice." 


WILLIAMS  COLLEGE. 
From  a  paiutiug  made  in  1845. 

The  modern  reader  is  a  little  surprised  to  read 
that  in  1804  "  war  no  longer  carries  havoc  and 
ruin  to  the  heart  of  an  inoffensive  country,  but 
sports  itself  in  the  uncultivated  fields  or  vents 
its  thunders  on  the  deep/'  Such  had  been  the 
"  pleasing  picture  till  unexpectedly  crimsoned  by 


104        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

an  event  as  unnatural  as  it  was  momentous." 
This  was  the  French  Revolution.  From  its  paths 
of  blood  the  young  optimist  turns  aside  to  study 
the  improvements  time  has  brought  in  in  the 
science  of  government.  "  The  practice  of  tor 
ture  has  been  abolished  from  the  German  courts 
of  justice."  The  state  of  the  European  peasan 
try  is  improved.  The  Ottoman  power  is  on  the 
decline.  But,  best  of  all,  "freedom  of  enquiry 
and  liberty  of  conscience  are  now  universally 
enjoyed."  We  lament  that  so  many  young  men 
"  reject  the  cheering  doctrines  of  the  Gospel "  ; 
but  how  can  we  "  wonder  that  on  the  liberation 
of  the  mind  from  the  restraints  of  the  Catholic 
faith,  human  reason  should  overleap  the  first 
weak  barriers  of  truth.  Infidelity  is  the  off 
spring  of  Popery ;  but  Popery  is  fallen,  and  the 
fate  of  religion  is  left  to  the  decision  of  reason." 
All  this  shows  a  brave  forelock  based  on  the 
abandonment  of  the  various  fetichisms  of  the 
century  before.  For  our  present  purpose,  for  a 
contemporary  view  of  the  nineteenth  century  as 
it  marched  along,  it  is  interesting  to  see  that 
this  boy,  in  a  newly  founded  college  in  the  wil 
derness,  says  of  the  Nation  that  "its  unrivalled 
growth  in  riches,  in  power,  and  in  respectability, 
the  increase  of  its  humane  and  literary  institu- 


TROY,  EXETER,  BOSTON  105 

tions,  with  the  unprecedented  excellence  of  its 
government  and  laws,  are  so  well  known  to  you 
that  you  cannot  but  acknowledge  their  impor 
tance.  Such  has  been  our  unparalleled  pros 
perity  that  if  a  man  were  called  upon  to  point 
out  a  model  of  national  happiness  he  would 
without  hesitation  name  the  last  fifteen  years 
in  the  history  of  the  United  States." 

Such  was  what  college  boys  dared  to  say  of 
their  own  country  in  those  happy  times  when 
there  were  no  pessimistic  New  York  weeklies. 

TROY,   EXETER,   BOSTON 

Williamstown,  wrhere  young  Hale  graduated, 
is  but  a  few  miles  from  Troy.  At  his  Commence 
ment,  or  at  that  time,  Mr.  John  D.  Dickenson, 
of  Troy,  engaged  him  to  be  the  tutor  of  his  son 
and  daughter  for  the  next  year.  In  that  time 
he  was  to  fit  the  boy  for  college  and  to  give  the 
girl  such  a  training  as  he  could  with  the  brother. 
But  this  course  of  training  was  not  to  begin 
immediately,  so  that  my  father  returned  to 
Westhampton,  and  from  Westhampton  went  to 
Troy.  I  suppose  he  wanted  to  see  the  city 
of  New  York,  which  was  already  the  largest 
city  in  the  new  Nation.  I  never  heard  how  he 
got  there,  and  I  do  not  remember  how  long 


106        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

he  stayed  there,  but  from  New  York  to  Troy 
he  went  in  a  sloop  or  schooner  —  one  of  the 
packets  of  the  time. 

Mr.  Dickenson  was  for  a  dozen  or  twenty 
years  the  leading  citizen  of  Troy.  My  father 
always  spoke  with  regard  and  respect  of  him  and 
of  his  own  two  pupils. 

He  was,  as  I  said,  to  complete  the  preparation 
of  the  boy  for  college.  This  meant  that  they 
were  to  read  together  most  of  the  Latin  and  all 
of  the  Greek  then  required  at  Williams  College 
or  at  Union  College.  The  boy  wanted  to  do 
this.  His  father  wanted  him  to  do  it,  and  my 
father  wanted  him  to  do  it.  He  did  it,  and  he 
entered  college  with  entire  success. 

The  experiment  satisfied  my  father  that  the 
fuss  now  made  about  the  preparatory  study  for 
Latin  and  Greek  is  what  Mr.  Adams  would  call 
a  fetich  and  what  I  should  call  a  bugaboo. 
When  I  was  an  overseer  at  Harvard  College,  the 
eternal  question  about  Greek  in  college  came  up, 
and  I  said,  in  a  speech  I  made,  that  I  would 
teach  the  Greek  necessary  to  enter  Harvard  Col 
lege  to  any  intelligent  boy  or  girl  of  sixteen  who 
wanted  to  do  it,  if  both  of  us  had  three  months' 
time  for  the  study.  I  looked  across  the  room 
to  Mr.  Seaver,  the  accomplished  superintendent 


TROY,  EXETER,  BOSTON  107 

of  the  Boston  schools,  and  I  said,  "  Mr.  Seaver 
will  say  the  same  thing,"  and  he  at  once 
assented. 

In  September,  1898,  I  saw  at  the  Hancock 
Cushman  School  in  Boston  three  hundred  and 
six  girls  who  had  just  entered  that  school,  who 
could  not,  all  told,  speak  fifty  words  of  English. 
In  the  next  June,  after  nine  months  of  training, 
they  could  speak  English  intelligibly,  read  it  in 
telligibly,  and  write  it  intelligibly.  The  major 
ity  of  them  were  Russians,  more  than  half  of  the 
rest  were  Germans,  and  the  remaining  fractions 
were  Bohemians,  Bulgarians,  Italians,  and  Heaven 
knows  what  —  even  Arabs.  I  may  say  in  passing 
that  not  one  French,  English,  Scotch,  Welsh, 
Irish,  or  American  girl  had  entered  this  Boston 
school  with  them. 

In  1873  I  had  the  same  thing  taught  me  from 
the  pupils'  side.  I  was  at  Buda-Pesth  and  was 
talking  in  Latin  with  my  friend  Baron  Orban, 
the  same  who  has  distinguished  himself  since  in 
the  Austro-Hungarian  Ministry.  I  said  to  him, 
"  How  do  you  all  learn  to  speak  Latin  when  you 
are  boys?"  He  said  that  he  was  sent  to  a  board 
ing-school  when  he  was  ten  years  old.  He  was 
given  one  month  and  was  told  that  if  after  one 
month  he  was  heard  speaking  anything  but 


108        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

Latin,  he  would  be  flogged.  The  poor  child  had 
to  say,  "  Da  mihi  panem  et  bntyrum,  si  placeat," 
or  starve.  And  he  preferred  the  new  language. 

All  of  which  is  hardly  an  excursion ;  for,  as 
these  memories  go  on,  this  reader,  if  he  holds  by 
us,  will  have  to  contrast  more  than  once  the 
tomfoolery  of  the  mechanical  processes  of  mere 
Instruction  against  the  efficiency  of  the  eternal 
principles  which  govern  real  Education. 

My  father's  own  tastes,  however,  led  him 
definitely  into  the  study  of  mathematics,  and  he 
liked  to  teach  the  mathematics.  He  never  lost 
his  fondness  for  the  classics.  In  speaking  to  his 
own  pupils  in  1807,  he  says  definitely,  "To  those 
of  you  who  are  destined  to  the  walks  of  a  learned 
life,  I  would  earnestly  recommend  a  diligent  cul 
tivation  of  classical  literature."  But,  as  I  have 
said,  his  tastes  ran  in  the  mathematical  and  prac 
tical  lines ;  and  so  in  1805  he  accepted  the  pro 
posal  made  to  him  by  Dr.  Abbot,  the  head  of 
Exeter  Academy,  who  invited  him  to  undertake 
the  mathematical  instruction  in  that  school. 

Phillips  Exeter  Academy  is 'still  among  the 
most  eminent  of  our  institutions  of  secondary 
instruction.  It  had  won  its  place  already  in  the 
respect  of  New  England.  And  I  am  proud  to 
say  that  I  think  one  of  the  steps  forward  and 


TROY,  EXETER,  BOSTON 


109 


upward  in  its  progress  was  taken  when  Dr. 
Abbot  selected  this  young  mathematician, 
Nathan  Hale,  to  direct  its  studies  in  the  line 
of  which  he  was  so  fond.  For  me  and  mine, 
the  selection  has  proved  important.  For  it  was 


PHILLIPS-EXETER  ACADEMY,  WHERE  NATHAN  HALE  TAUGHT. 
Built  in  1791.     The  wings  were  added  iu  1822. 

at  Exeter  that  my  father  made  the  acquaintance 
and  won  the  friendship  of  Alexander  Hill 
Everett,  afterward  for  most  of  his  life  in  the 
diplomatic  service  of  the  country.  From  this 
friendship  grew  my  father's  attachment  to  Sarah 
Preston  Everett,  the  sister  of  his  friend,  whom 


110        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 


he  married  in  September,  1816,  and  who  is  my 
mother.  Where  I,  who  write  these  lines,  should 
be  if  Nathan  Hale  had  not  gone  to  Exeter  the 

year  he  became  of  age,  I 
will  not  undertake  to  say. 
Exeter  was  really  a 
home  of  the  muses  at 
that  time.  Leading  in 
its  social  order  was  Judge 
Oliver  Peabody,  of  the 
Supreme  Court  of  New 
Hampshire,  and  his  ac 
complished  family.  Two 
twin  brothers,  William 
Bourne  Oliver  and  Oliver 
William  Bourne  Peabody, 
both  of  Harvard  College 
in  the  class  of  1816,  who, 
as  men,  afterward  filled 
an  important  place  in  the  best  literary  circles 
of  New  England,  were  little  boys  in  1805.  I  do 
not  know  what  Williamstown  had  had  to  offer 
in  the  way  of  literature  or  art,  or  the  social 
joys  which  are  connected  with  literature  and  art, 
but  I  do  know  that  at  Exeter  my  father  found 
a  social  circle  as  much  alive  to  the  delights  and 
to  the  duties  which  belong  to  the  highest  edu- 


DR.  OLIVER  PEABODY  OF 

EXETER. 
From  an  early  miniature. 


TROY,  EXETER,  BOSTON  111 

cation  of  one's  time  as  any  social  centre  of  the 
American  world  in  which  he  could  have  lived. 

In  1806  Mr.  Alexander  Everett  brought  with 
him  to  Exeter  his  younger  brother  Edward,  who 
spent  his  last  year  there  before  entering  Harvard 
College.  The  note  from  him,  written  when  he 
was  eleven  years  old,  is  perhaps  the  earliest  of 
his  writings  extant.  See  pp.  112,  113. 

I  think  my  father  doubted  for  a  little  whether 
he  would  study  law  in  Boston  or  in  Troy.  I 
think  his  father  had  wished  that  he  should  be  a 
minister.  I  know  that  he  had  studied  Hebrew 
in  college.  But  he  once  said  to  me  that  he 
studied  Hebrew  because  there  was  nothing  else 
there  he  could  study ;  and  certainly  by  the  time 
the  year  1807  came,  he  had  determined  on  the 
training  of  a  lawyer.  He  went  back  to  West- 
hampton  and  Troy,  after  two  years'  service  at 
Exeter,  but  he  returned  this  time  to  Boston,  in 
the  spring  of  1808.  When  he  arrived  in  Boston, 
he  entered  himself  in  the  office  of  Oxenbridge 
Thacher,  and  he  was  admitted  to  the  bar  in 
1810. 

Meanwhile  the  leaders  of  Massachusetts  poli 
tics,  in  especial  John  Lowell,  of  Roxbury,  who 
was  proud  to  call  himself  "  a  Massachusetts 
farmer,"  and  the  other  young  Federal  leaders  of 


112         MEMORIES    OF    A   HUNDRED    YEARS 


EDWARD  EVERETT'S  LETTP:R. 


their  time,  found  that  the  Columbian  Centinel, 
which  had  been  the  organ  of  the  Federal  party, 
did  not  meet  their  wishes  as  a  newspaper,  and 


TROY,  EXETER,  BOSTON  113 


EDWARD  EVERETT'S  LETTER. 


established  the  Weekly  Messenger.  This  John 
Lowell  was  the  son  of  the  John  Lowell  of  New- 
buryport  whom  I  call  "  the  Emancipator."  It 
would  be  fair  to  say  that  the  Messenger  was 
an  organ  of  young  Federalism  in  Massachusetts. 
It  was  the  first  paper  in  the  country  which  de 
clined  to  receive  any  advertisements,  and  threw 


VOL.    I.  I 


114         MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

itself  upon  its  worth  as  a  journal  of  literature 
and  politics  for  its  reason  to  be. 

The  coterie  of  leaders  naturally  wanted  some 
young  men  to  take  the  oversight,  to  look  after 
the  proof-sheets  and  the  rest,  and  in  this  service 
Nathan  Hale  and  Henry  D.  Sedgwick  were  em 
ployed  from  the  very  beginning.  It  naturally 
happens  in  all  such  cases  that  the  mayors  of  the 
palace  become  the  kings.  More  and  more  defi 
nitely  did  my  father  show  that  he  was,  by  his 
early  and  his  later  training,  fitted  for  the  posi 
tion  of  an  editor.  More  and  more  did  his  tastes 
lead  him  this  way ;  and  after  a  practice  at  the 
bar,  successful  as  young  men's  experience  goes, 
for  four  years,  in  1814  he  bought  the  Boston 
Daily  Advertiser,  which  had  been  established 
a  short  time  before,  and  for  fifty  years  after 
ward  he  edited  that  journal. 

The  young  lawyers  of  to-day  would  be  amused 
if  it  were  proposed  to  them  to  carry  out  the 
details  of  professional  life  in  such  ways  as  were 
required  in  the  life  of  young  attorneys  ninety 
years  ago.  My  father  used  to  say  that  he  was 
the  first  person  who  drove  a  chaise  from  Augusta 
across  to  Bangor.  It  was  his  duty,  I  suppose,  to 
attach  some  property  in  Bangor.  At  all  events, 
he  conducted  in  person  some  transaction  there 


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TROY,  EXETER,  BOSTON  117 

for  one  of  his  clients.  He  went  from  Boston  to 
Augusta  in 'the  stage,  and  there  took  a  wagon 
or  chaise  by  which  he  went  across  the  roads 
which  before  had  been  used  only  by  riders  on 
horseback  or  by  teams  with  freight.  This  must 
have  been  in  the  short  war  with  England.1 

As  early  as  1809  Alexander  Hill  Everett, 
who  was  afterward  to  be  his  brother-in-law, 
sailed  with  Mr.  John  Quincy  Adams  for  Europe,, 
having  engaged  to  be  Mr.  Adams's  private  sec 
retary.  In  one  or  another  diplomatic  capacity 
Mr.  Everett  spent  most  of  his  time  in  Europe 
until  1829,  when  General  Jackson  recalled  him 
from  Spain.  My  father  was  thus  in  close  cor 
respondence  with  one  of  his  most  intimate 
friends,  who  wTas,  on  his  part,  from  1809  to 
1812,  in  the  centre  of  that  diplomacy  which  has 
proved  so  important  in  the  history  of  the  century. 
I  do  not  know  when  Mr.  Hale  learned  German, 
but  he  always,  since  I  can  recollect,  read  French 
and  German  with  ease;  and  the  Weekly  Messen 
ger  and  the  Daily  Advertiser  became  exponents 
for  America  of  the  European  news  in  a  position 

1  A  correspondent  tells  me  that  on  the  tombstone  of  Caleb 
Shaw  in  Newport,  Maine,  it  is  recorded  that  "  he  drove  the  first 
wheeled  vehicle  from  the  Kennebec  to  the  Penobscot." 

Yes ;  but  a  "  wheeled  vehicle  "  may  be  an  ox-team  and  prob 
ably  was. 


118        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

which  no  American  newspaper  had  taken  before. 
In  those  days  news  did  not  corne  from  hour  to 
hour,  but  sometimes  lucky  vessels  ran  into  Bos 
ton  with  intelligence  six  weeks  later  than  any 
which  had  been  received  before.  In  the  office 
of  the  Weekly  Messenger,  in  my  boyhood,  there 
were  traditions  of  extras  which  covered  more 
than  a  month  of  the  history  of  the  world. 

Mr.  Webster's  career  in  Boston  had  begun  a 
little  earlier  than  my  father's.  His  brother 
Ezekiel  had  established  a  school  there  in  which 
I  have  heard  that  Daniel  Webster  sometimes 
served  as  an  assistant.  I  think  Edward  Everett 
was  once  a  pupil  in  this  school,  but  Mr.  Webster 
established  his  law  office  at  Boscawen,  in  New 
Hampshire,  and  then  at  Portsmouth.  He  repre 
sented  Portsmouth  in  the  War  Congress  of  1813. 
In  the  great  fire  of  Portsmouth  in  December, 
1813,  his  house  and  library  were  destroyed,  and 
this  disaster  tempted  him  to  remove  from  that 
place.  He  had  some  hesitation,  in  the  choice  of 
a  new  home,  between  Albany  and  Boston.  But 
finally,  in  the  year  1816,  he  determined  upon 
Boston,  where  at  once  he  'took  the  place  in  his 
profession  due  to  him.  My  father  and  he  were 
very  intimate.  Edward  Everett  graduated  at 
Cambridge  in  1811,  and  between  him  and  Mr. 


TROY,  EXETER,  BOSTON 


119 


Webster  there  grew  up  a  close  attachment.  Mr. 
Webster's  second  son  was  named  Edward  in  con 
sequence  of  this  personal  attachment. 

The  Messenger  and  the  Advertiser  may  be  con 
sidered  as  representing  in  Massachusetts  the  new 
light  of  those  leaders  of  Massachusetts  who  took 
the  place  which 
in  the  death  of 
the  old  Federal 
party  had  been 
left  vacant.  I 
go  into  these 
details,  of  little 
interest  to  any 
but  my  children 
and  myself,  be 
cause,  as  I  have 
said,  my  house  is 
filled  with  the 
correspondence 
between  Europe 
and  America,  between  Washington  and  Boston, 
between  Boston  and  half  the  world  indeed,  which 
grew  out  of  these  relations ;  and  when  I  speak  in 
these  papers  of  the  history  of  the  United  States 
from  1810  to  1901,  1  am  speaking  as  one  who 
illustrates  what  he  says  from  such  materials. 


DANIKL  WEBSTER. 
After  the  portrait  by  R.  M.  Staigg. 


THE   SMALLER   BOSTON 


CHAPTER   III 

THE    SMALLER   BOSTON 

BOSTON   IN   1808 

THE  Boston  which  welcomed  mj  father  after 
his  two  days'  ride  from  Northampton  was 
a  town  of  gardens.  A  few  years  after  that  time 
an  ingenious  Frenchman  made  a  model  of  the 
town  in  cork,  cutting  out  his  separate  houses 
and  churches,  and  painting  them  in  their  proper 
colors.  In  the  little  handbill  which  explained 
this  pretty  reproduction  of  the  town  he  says 
that  there  are  in  it  nine  blocks  of  brick  build 
ings,  of  which  one  or  two  are  new.  The  largest 
of  these  blocks  were  the  two  curved  sides  of 
Ck)rnhill,  which  still  stand.  The  name  Cornhill, 
however,  then  applied  to  that  part  of  Washing 
ton  Street  between  Milk  Street  and  Dock  Square. 
The  Cornhill  of  to-day  was  then  called  Market 
Street. 

Most  of  the  private  houses  in  Washington 
Street  had  little  yards  or  gardens,  as  we  should 
say,  on  one  or  both  sides,  and  on  the  street  only 

123 


124        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 


windows,  the  front  door  opening  into  the  garden. 
In  those  days  there  were  private  houses  in 
Washington  Street.  You  may  see  the  same 
arrangement  in  the  Main  Street  at  Charlestown 
to-day,  on  the  other  side  of  Charles  River.  In 

many  cases  there 
were  orchards  of 
considerable  size 
immediately  ad 
joining  the  houses. 
The  account  which 
Marshall  Wilder 
gave  in  "  The 
Memorial  History 
of  Boston "  of 
the  early  gardens 
makes  one's 
mouth  water. 
"  One  of  the 
largest  gardens  of 
that  day  was  that 
of  Governor  James  Bowdoin,  who  had  a  large 
house  and  extensive  lot  of  land  on  Beacon  Street, 
at  the  corner  of  Bowdoin  Street,  reaching  quite 
over  the  hill  —  what  is  now  Ashburton  Place. 
This  large  garden  abounded  in  the  finest  fruits, 
pears,  peaches,  apples,  and  grapes."  Mr.  Kirk 


JAMES  BOWDOIN. 
After  the  miniature  by  J.  H.  Daniels. 


BOSTON   IN    1808 


125 


Boott's  garden  was  spread  around  the  present 
site  of  the  Revere  House.  "  Fruit  trees  and 
vines  and  foreign  grapes  and  other  tender  fruits 
which  now  succeed  only  under  glass  grew  in 
the  open  air."  In  Summer  Street  the  gardens 
of  the  Amorys,  the  Salisburys  and  Gardners,  ran 
back  to  Bedford  Street.  In  some  instances 


BEACON  STREET  A  HUNDRED  YEARS  AGO. 

these  gardens  covered  two,  three,  or  even  more 
acres.  No  such  luxury  in  open  fields  or  orchards 
exists  now. 

These  memoranda  of  old  vacant  spaces  in 
Boston  will  have  a  certain  interest  for  people 
who  buy  their  thread  and  needles,  perhaps, 
where  I  have  picked  and  eaten  pears,  or  have 
aimed  my  arrow  at  a  target  a  hundred  yards 
away. 

But  the  exterior  social  changes  between  the 
active'  maritime  town  of  thirty  thousand  people 


126        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 


into  which,  after  two  days,  the  Brookfield 
"stage  "  brought  my  father  in  1808,  are  perhaps 
more  noteworthy,  when  Boston  life  is  compared 
against  the  more  conventional  life  of  to-day.  A 
memorandum  now  before  me,  of  1806  or  1807, 
by  the  late  James  Hale,  of  New  York,  speaks  of 
Colonel  T.  H.  Perkins,  for  many  years  the  prince 
of  Boston  merchants,  as 
trudging  home  for  his  eight 
o'clock  breakfast  from  old 
Faneuil  Hall  witli  the  mar 
ket-basket  containing  his  one 
o'clock  dinner.  The  same 
memorandum  says  that  Har 
rison  Gray  Otis,  the  eloquent 
Senator  of  the  State  in 
Washington,  might  be  seen 
doing  the  same  thing;  and 
that  William  ("Billy")  Gray,  whose  ship  dis 
covered  the  Columbia  River,  Benjamin  Bussey, 
the  founder  of  the  Agricultural  School  of  Har 
vard  College,  Peter  Chardon  Brooks  and  Israel 
Thorndike,  both  of  them  among  the  richest 
men  in  New  England,  might  be  every  morning 
in  the  same  company. 

These   gentlemen   had   bought   their  dinners 
personally  at  Faneuil  Hall  Market.     It  is  a  little 


CUSTOMHOUSE. 


BOSTON   IN    1808 


127 


queer  that  when  one  goes  into  the  historic 
Faneuil  Hall,  which  we  Boston  people  call  "  the 
Cradle  of  Liberty/'  he  passes  upstairs  between 
the  stalls  of  a  market  where  he  sees  beef  and 
pork,  cabbages  and  lettuce,  for  sale.  This  is 
because  Peter  Faneuil,  the  son  of  a  Huguenot, 
built  the  hall  for  the  town  of  Boston  when 
twenty  thousand  people  lived 
there.  He  gave  it  to  the 
town  that  the  lower  part 
might  be  used  for  a  market, 
the  upper  part  for  a  place 
of  assembly  for  the  citizens. 
At  this  moment,  if  any  fifty 
citizens  agree  that  they  want 
to  hold  a  public  meeting  in 
this  hall,  they  can  have  the 
use  of  the  hall  without  money 
and  without  price  for  that  purpose.  And  the 
lawyers  have  long  since  instructed  the  govern 
ment  of  the  city  that  if  she  does  not  continue 
the  use  of  the  lower  story  as  a  market,  some 
Huguenot  of  a  new  century  might  appear  from 
France  and  establish  his  claim  for  this  historic 
property. 

In  the  business  and  pleasure  of  thirty  thou 
sand  people  there  had  to  be  large  stables.     And 


OLD  STATE  HOUSE. 


128        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

of  the  region  now  most  crowded  in  the  daily  life 
of  the  town  a  large  part  was  then  given  to  such 
stables.  Niles's  stable  ran  back  from  School 
Street  northerly.  On  Bromfield  Street  a  large 
stable  served  the  customers  of  the  Indian  Queen 
Tavern.  This  extended  southerly.  The  Marl 
boro  Hotel  stood  where  the  bookseller's  arch 


«?  it   •  i 
•  11   11 
i  11   1 1  i 
i  11   11  i 


EAST  VIEW  OF  FANEUIL  HALL  MARKET. 

now  is.  The  taverns  which  stood  where  the 
Boston  Theatre  and  Keith's  now  stand,  and  op 
posite  them,  were  called  the  Lion  Tavern  and 
the  Lamb  Tavern  and  the  Lafayette  Tavern. 
Their  stables  ran  back  there.  On  the  south  side 
of  West  Street  was  another  large  stable.  There 
was  a  very  large  stable  on  the  west  side  of  Haw- 


BOSTON   IN    1808 


129 


ley  Street,  where  the  great  retail  shops  of  Wash 
ington  Street  now  run  back  and  cover  the  whole 
territory. 

In  1830,  when  I  was  eight  years  old,  I  was 
sent  on  a  Sunday  morning 
with  my  brother  Nathan  to 
the  house  of  Mr.  Alexander 
Everett,  in  Summer  Street, 
with  the  "  extra  "  from  the 
Daily  Advertiser,  which  con 
tained  the  news  of  the 
downfall  of  Charles  X  and 
the  Parisian  Revolution  of 
1830.  We  must  needs  go 
through  Hawley  Street,  I 
do  not  know  why,  but  when  we  arrived  in 
Summer  Street  we  found  we  had  lost  our 
documents.  We  returned  at  once,  to  find  that 
the  stablemen  of  the  street  were  reading 
our  news  and  so  we  regained  our  precious 
"  extra."  I  tell  the  story,  because  I  never  pass 
through  Hawley  Street  without  thinking  of 
Charles  X. 

The  very  queer  lay  of  the  streets  in  one  and 
another  part  of  Boston  may  be  referred  fre 
quently  to  the  former  existence  of  these  great 
u  lots "  of  land,  all  but  forgotten,  which  were 


FANEUIL  HALL. 


VOL.  i.  — K 


130        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

covered  by  barns  for  hay,  and  other  cheap 
wooden  buildings. 

Into  a  town  like  this  there  shambled  in  very 
different  stages,  which  were  never  called  stage 
coaches,  from  all  parts  of  New  England ;  or, 
very  likely,  travellers  arrived  in  their  own 
chaises.  Observe  that  no  wagon  of  four  wheels 
for  pleasure  travelling  was  known  until  General 
Dearborn  introduced  such  a  wagon  from  the 
West  in  the  period  of  the  English  war ;  and 
the  light  four-wheeled  wagon  in  which  people 
began  to  ride  from  place  to  place  was  called  the 
"  Dearborn  wagon."  l  Besides  the  spring  of  the 
wagon  proper,  the  seat  hung  on  a  spring  of  its 
own ;  it  was,  therefore,  well  adapted  for  corduroy 
riding.  This  seems  to  have  been  a  Western 
invention,  when  New  York  was  a  Western 
State. 

The  first  steam  railroad  line  which  carried 
passengers  out  of  Boston  was  the  Boston  and 
Worcester  Railroad  Company,  which  sent  a 
train,  mostly  as  a  matter  of  curiosity,  nine  miles 
out,  to  West  Newton,  in  the  summer  of  1833. 
Before  that  time  the  communication  with  the 


1  T  am  sorry  to  say  that  the  Century  Dictionary  says  that 
this  wagon  was  invented  by  a  man  named  Dearborn.  But  I 
tell  the  tale  as  it  was  told  to  me. 


BOSTON   IN    1808 


131 


interior  was  made  on  the  common  roads  with 
horse  traction,  with  the  exception,  which  is 
hardly  an  exception,  of  the  few  passengers  and 
slight  freight  which  came  on  the  Middlesex  Canal 
from  the  Merrimack  River.  Boston  was  supplied 
with  lumber,  as  our  good  American  English  has 
it,  and  with  most  of  the  fuel  for  burning,  from 
Maine,  and  such  products  of  the  forest  were 


BOSTON  AND  WORCESTER  RAILWAY. 

brought  by  water.  Such  supplies  as  this  made 
fuel  very  cheap  in  eastern  Massachusetts.  Our 
trade  with  the  West  Indies  also  made  molasses 
a  very  easy  product  to  import  here.  Putting 
these  two  easy  and  cheap  commodities  together, 
that  is  to  say,  wood  under  a  boiler  and  molasses 
into  the  boiler,  and  you  obtained  New  England 
rum.  For  the  first  forty  years  of  the  century, 
therefore,  the  manufacture  of  rum  was  a  princi- 


132        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

pal  manufacture  of  the  town  of  Boston  ;  and  to 
this  hour,  whoever  digs  a  new  cellar  for  any 
large  building  in  what  was  then  the  South  End 
of  Boston  runs  against  the  old  excavations 
which  were  made  for  condensing  vats  in  those 
days. 

The  population  of  Boston  in  1808  was  about 
thirty  thousand.  The  space  occupied  by  the  old 
peninsula  was  about  seven  hundred  acres.  My 
father  used  to  say,  when  he  was  seventy  years 
old,  that  when  he  came  to  Boston  the  enterprise 
of  internal  improvement  which  attracted  the 
most  interest  on  the  part  of  Boston  people  was 
that  by  which  they  should  dig  down  Beacon  Hill 
and  fill  up  the  mill-pond,  celebrated  in  Franklin's 
early  biography,  at  the  northern  end  of  the  town. 
This  was  successfully  done,  so  that  Mr.  Thurston, 
of  the  house  in  Bowdoin  Street  destroyed  only 
lately,  used  to  say  that  the  chimney  of  his  new 
house,  four  stories  high,  was  at  the  same  spot  in 
space  as  where  the  doorsteps  were  some  years 
before.  This  condition  of  things  lasted  until 
the  end  of  1847,  when  it  was  the  business  of  my 
father,  as  head  of  the  water  commission  of  that 
time,  to  rebuild  Beacon  Hill,  in  order  to  give 
sufficient  height  to  the  reservoir  which  should 
supply  the  highest  levels  of  water  in  Boston. 


THE  LAST  LEAVES  ON  THE  TREE 


133 


Time  rolled  by,  and  in  the  last  week  of  1889  it 
was  my  privilege,  in  the  company  of  Governor 
Oliver  Ames,  to  offer  in  words  the  prayers  of 
the  great  assembly  when  w^e  laid  the  corner 
stone  of  the  annex  to  the  State  House,  for  which 


THE  OLD  STATE  HOUSE. 
From  a  picture  owned  by  the  Massachusetts  Historical  Society. 

corner-stone  my  father's  reservoir  had  been 
pulled  down  and  Beacon  Hill  again  reduced  in 
its  altitude. 

THE  LAST  LEAVES  ON  THE  TREE 

The  Boston  to  which  my  father  came  in  1808, 
and  to  which  Mr.  Webster  came  in  1814,  was 


134        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

separated  by  a  generation  from  the  Boston  of 
the  Revolution.  Mr.  Webster  alludes  more  than 
once,  I  think,  to  the  fact  that  he  was  born  the 
year  before  the  treaty  of  1783;  and  I  always 
liked  to  tell  my  father,  who  was  born  in  1784, 
that  he  was  as  old  as  the  Nation.  When  he 
came  to  Boston,  the  Revolutionary  men  were 
still  on  the  stage  as  old  men.  Even  Jefferson 
had  not  dared  remove  General  Benjamin  Lin 
coln,  who  had  been  made  Collector  of  the  Port 
by  Washington,  He  resigned  in  1808.  Peter 
Oxenbridge  Thacher,  with  whom  my  father 
studied  law,  was  born  in  1776,  the  son  of  that 
Dr.  Thacher  who  wrote,  from  his  personal  ob 
servation,  the  American  official  account  of  the 
Battle  of  Bunker  Hill.  He  was  minister  of 
Maiden,  and,  with  half  his  flock,  he  saw  the 
battle  on  the  "Rail  Fence"  side,  across  the 
Mystic  River. 

So  in  1808,  one  saw  men  to  whom  the  Revo 
lution  was  as  fresh  as  the  Civil  War  is  with  us, 
and  as  distant.  And,  just  as  the  generation 
stepping  on  the  stage  now  does  not  care  to  be 
bound  by  the  traditions  of  Bull  Run  or  Antietam 
or  Gettysburg,  just  so  then  the  younger  school 
of  politicians  were  finding  out  that  they  had  a 
country  of  their  own. 


THE   LAST   LEAVES   ON    THE   TREE         135 

For  myself,  I  did  not  see  men  to  know  them 
for  yet  a  generation  more. 

I  was  born  in  1822,  fifty-seven  years  after  the 
Stamp  Act  and  the  Stamp  Act  Riots.  Fifty- 
seven  years  after  my  birth,  in  1879,  Mr.  Justin 
Winsor  asked  me,  as  one  of  his  co-workers,  to 
write  the  history  of  the  Siege  of  Boston  for  the 
Memorial  History. 

I  did  the  work  as  well  as  I  could.  I  was  a 
little  amused  —  more  than  amused,  I  was  inter 
ested  —  to  observe  that  my  birthday  was  half 
way  between  the  time  which  separated  me  and 
mine  from  King  George  and  his.  When  my 
work  was  done,  I  was  curious  to  test  the  value 
of  personal  tradition  by  seeing  how  much  my 
own  memories  had  contributed  to  my  own  arti 
cle.  I  believe  that  there  were  twelve  anecdotes 
in  that  chapter  which  I  have  heard  and  had  not 
read,  not  one  of  the  slightest  real  importance. 
But  I  propose  now  to  go  into  a  little  detail  with 
regard  to  them,  because  I  think  that  such  detail 
furnishes  comment  of  some  use  on  a  habit  far 
too  general,  of  relying  upon  tradition. 

My  dear  old  friend  James  Savage,  of  the  Mas 
sachusetts  Historical  Society,  really  thought,  I 
believe,  that  the  traditional  anecdote  was  false 
because  it  was  traditional.  This  goes  much  too 


136 


MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 


far,  but,  on  the  other  hand,  such  a  series  of 
reminiscences  as  iny  twelve  seem  to  me  to 
show  of  how  little  worth  personal  tradition 
is  at  the  end  of  the  century.  Here  was  I, 
growing  up  in  Boston,  within  a  century  of  the 
outbreak  of  the  Revolution,  and  here  are  the 
facts  which  come  to  me  from  other  sources 
than  written  history.  For  local  color,  yes,  for 


LAFAYETTE'S  VISIT  TO  BOSTON. 
From  an  old  print. 

what  the  artists  call  the  broken  lights  in  the 
foreground,  such  anecdotes  have  a  certain 
value ;  but  for  the  foundation  facts,  from  which 
the  truth  of  history  is  to  be  discovered,  we 
must  be  very  careful  how  we  trust  to  the 
memories  of  men.1 

1  When  in  1863  Mr.  Savage  was  asked  at  a  dinner  party  if 
he  remembered  my  "  Man  Without  a  Country,"  he  said  that 
the  name  was  fictitious,  but  that  he  remembered  the  court- 
martial. 


THE   LAST   LEAVES    ON    THE   TREE          137 

I  must  have  seen  Lafayette  himself  with  the 
eye  of  the  flesh,  on  the  17th  of  June,  1825.  I 
was  three  years  and  more  than  three  months 
old,  and  on  that  day  Lafayette  went  in  pro 
cession  from  Boston  to  Charlestown  to  lay  the 
corner-stone  of  Bunker  Hill  Monument,  on  the 
fiftieth  anniversary  of  the  Battle  of  Bunker 
Hill.1  I  was 
a  little  boy,  re 
covering  from 
scarlet  fever, 
and  I  was 
lifted  up  at 
the  window  to 
see  the  pro 
cession  pass 
which  escorted 
Lafayette.  The 

place    Was    Op-  LAFAYETTE. 

•1,1       rr'  From  a  colored  print. 

posite  the  Tre- 

mont  Building  of  to-day,  where  the  Tremont 
House  stood  for  a  half-century.  At  that  time 
there  was  a  large  garden  or  orchard  there, 
with  three  wooden  houses  upon  it. 

1  This  battle  is  so  far  forgotten  that,  in  a  careful  revise, 
which  had  passed  the  correctors  in  what  was  then  the  best 
printing-house  in  America,  within  sight  of  the  Monument,  I 
once  had  the  words  come  to  me  as  the  Battle  of  Bunker  Kill! 
Tii  is  gives  a  sort  of  Boer  sound  to  our  history. 


138        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

Alas  and  alas !  such  are  the  memories  of 
childhood  that,  while  I  can  recall  the  green 
feathers  of  the  Rifle  Rangers,  a  crack  military 
company  of  that  day,  and  also  the  yellow  badge 
that  was  given  to  me  which  had  Lafayette's 
head  printed  upon  it,  I  have  now  no  recollection 
either  of  the  carriage  in  which  he  rode  or  the 
horses  which  drew  it,  far  less  of  the  hero  himself. 

My  father  then  lived  in  the  second  house 
from  the  southern  corner  of  School  Street,  but 
not  long  after  he  removed  into  a  new  house 
which  was  then  built  on  the  corner  lot,  occupy 
ing,  as  the  other  house  did,  part  of  the  site 
of  the  present  Parker  House.  As  we  children 
stood  at  the  window  to  see  the  people  pass,  we 
used  to  see  Major  Melvill,  who  was  really  a 
hero  of  the  Tea  Party.  He  is  the  "last  leaf 
upon  the  tree  "  of  Holmes's  song :  — 

"  But  now  he  walks  the  streets, 
And  he  looks  at  all  he  meets 

Sad  and  wan, 

And  he  shakes  his  feeble  head, 
That  it  seems  as  if  he  said, 

'  They  are  gone.' " 

One  knows  that  he  really  was  of  the  Tea 
Party  because  he  never  said  he  was.  It  is  to 
be  noted,  in  any  study  of  what  tradition  is 


THE   LAST   LEAVES   ON   THE   TREE         139 

worth,  that  if  in  the  last  century  any  man 
said  he  was  of  the  Tea  Party,  you  knew  that 
strictly  he  was  not.  If,  on  the  other  hand, 
when  the  subject  was  alluded  to  with  an  old 
Boston  man,  he  smiled  and  winked  and  per 
haps  said  nothing ;  if  he  turned  the  conversa 
tion  in  some  other  direction,  you  were  almost 
sure  that  he  was  one  of  the  two  parties  which 
were  organized  to  throw  the  tea  overboard. 
These  members  met  at  Griffin's  wharf,  coming 
from  the  North  End  and  the  South  End  by 
appointment.  They  placed  sentries  at  the 
head  of  the  wharf  to  prevent  interference  from 
any  one.  Their  faces  in  some  instances,  and 
I  think  in  all,  were  blackened,  that  they  might 
not  be  recognized.  And  they  went  to  work 
as  stevedores  would  do,  in  a  systematic  way, 
to  haul  up  the  tea  from  the  vessels,  to  break 
open  the  chests,  and  to  throw  the  tea  into  the 
water.  All  these  men  had  sworn  with  a 
masonic  oath  that  they  would  never  implicate 
any  one  in  the  transaction.  If,  therefore,  when 
these  men  were  old  men,  they  did  not  say  they 
were  there,  that  is  no  reason  for  supposing  they 
were  not. 

On  the   other  hand,  every  man   and    boy  in 
Boston  who  had  two  legs  repaired  to  the  scene 


140        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

to  look  on.  Some  of  them  even  struggled 
through  the  guard,  as  did  the  father  of  the 
late  Charles  Sprague,  the  poet.  Mr.  Charles 
Sprague  told  me  this  story.  His  father  strug 
gled  through  because  his  master  who  was  at 
work  in  the  Tea  Party,  recognized  him.  He 
blackened  the  boy's  face  with  soot  from  a 
blacksmith's  shop,  as  the  rest  were  blackened, 
and  permitted  him  to  join  in  the  work.  But 
young  Sprague  was  not,  and  never  pretended 
that  he  was,  one  of  what  is  technically  called 
the  Tea  Party.  Major  Melvill  was,  and  never 
said  he  was.  Any  amount  of  the  tea  as  the 
tide  went  out  drifted  on  the  beach  at  South 
Boston,  and  there  are  few  old  Boston  'people 
who  have  not  seen  vials  of  the  tea  which  were 
taken  from  the  mounds  which  were  then  upon 
the  beach.  But  we  are  apt  to  forget  how  little 
room  tea  takes. 

A  correspondent,  Mr.  Fritz  Jordan,  well  in 
formed  in  such  matters  writes  me  :  — 

"  I  make  the  following  computations  as  to  the 
Tea  Party  of  December  16,  1773. 

"John  Adams  says  in  his  letter  of  Dec.  17 
that  all  the  tea  in  three  ships  was  destroyed. 
Other  records  state  that  the  names  of  the  ships 
were  the  Dartmouth,  Eleanor,  and  Beaver.  I 


THE    LAST    LEAVES    ON    THE    TREE          141 

have  seen  no  statement  as  to  their  size,  but  it 
is  possible  that  there  are  some  records  extant 
giving  it.  The  Dartmouth  was  owned  in  Bos 
ton.  The  number  of  chests  destroyed  was  324. 
I  have  no  data  from  old  invoices  as  to  the 
probable  size  of  these  chests,  but  as  they  were 
apparently  passed  out  of  the  hold  by  hand  and 
without  the  use  of  tackles  they  probably  did  not 
weigh  over  one  hundred  pounds  or  thereabouts. 
Most  of  the  tea  of  to-day  is  imported  in  half 
chests  of  about  55  Ibs.  gross  weight  and  40  Ibs. 
net  weight,  and  of  2-J-  feet  cubical  contents. 
Assuming  that  these  chests  were  double  the 
size,  or  80  Ibs.  net  weight,  110  Ibs.  gross  weight, 
and  5  cubic  feet  contents,  the  324  would  con 
tain  27,360  Ibs.  of  tea,  equal  to  more  than  12 
tons,  or  including  the  packages,  17  tons  weight, 
or  about  40J  tons  measurement.  A  room  10 
feet  wide,  20  feet  long,  and  a  trifle  over  8  feet 
high  would  hold  the  324  chests.  They  could 
be  loaded  into  an  ordinary  freight  car,  or  put 
into  the  smoking  room  of  a  modern  steamship. 
"  These  ships  are  spoken  of  as  tea  ships  and 
nothing  is  said  of  any  other  cargo,  but  it  appears 
to  me  that  they  must  have  had  some  other 
cargo,  as  it  is  probable  that  they  were  from 
fifty  to  over  a  hundred  tons  burthen." 


142        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

I  remember  no  one  else  who  actually  wore  a 
blue  coat  and  leathern  breeches,  as  the  hero  of 
Dr.  Holmes's  ballad  does. 

I  think  that  Major  Melvill  was  the  first  sur 
vivor  of  the  Revolutionary  soldier  whom  I  saw, 
knowing  that  he  had  been  a  Revolutionary  sol 
dier.  I  must  have  seen  many  such  men,  but  in 
1830,  when  my  real  memories  begin,  people 
would  hardly  point  them  out  in  the  street. 
By  which  I  mean  that  a  man  who  was  twenty- 
one  on  the  day  of  the  Battle  of  Bunker  Hill 
was  in  1830  seventy-six  years  old.  In  all  no 
tices  for  public  processions,  for  many  years  after 
that  time,  there  was  a  place  reserved  for  "  sur 
vivors  of  the  Revolution."  The  one  exception 
of  a  veritable  Revolutionary  soldier  with  whom 
I  have  ever  talked  was  Mr.  Eben  Clapp,  of 
Northampton.  I  preached  in  Northampton  in 
January  and  February  and  March,  1843.  Mr. 
Clapp  was  one  of  the  constant  attendants  at 
our  church.  I  dare  not  say  one  of  my  con 
stant  hearers,  for  the  old  man  asked  me  once 
to  give  out  the  text  distinctly  and  address  it 
to  him  personally,  as  he  sat  in  the  front  pew. 
He  said,  "  When  I  hear  the  young  men's  texts, 
I  know  what  they  are  going  to  say,"  and  im 
plied  that  he  did  not  care  for  much  beside  the 


THE   LAST   LEAVES   ON    THE   TREE          143 

text.  Mr.  Clapp  had  been  out  "  ag'in'  Bur- 
goyne"  in  1777.  The  whole  of  the  Connecti 
cut  Valley  in  Massachusetts  was  swept  by 
conscription,  and  every  man  from  sixteen  to 
fifty-five  was  enrolled  and  had  to  march  with 
the  militia  of  Hampshire  County  to  join  the 
army  under  Schuyler,  Gates,  or  Lincoln.  Then 
there  came  another  draft  for  the  "exempts." 
Mr.  Clapp's  grandfather,  who  was  nearly  sixty, 
would  have  been  obliged  to  march  with  this 
contingent,  but  Eben  Clapp,  a  boy  of  fifteen, 
begged  that  he  might  be  accepted  as  his  grand 
father's  substitute,  and  was  so  accepted.  With 
this  company  of  "  exempts  "  he  marched  as  far 
north  as  what  was  known  as  "  Number  Four  " 
in  New  Hampshire,  which  is  now  the  town 
of  Charlestown,  New  Hampshire.  There  they 
heard  of  Burgoyne's  surrender,  and  they  re 
turned  to  their  homes.  The  conversations 
which  I  used  to  have  with  Eben  Clapp  are, 
so  far  as  I  know,  the  only  conversations  I 
ever  had  with  a  Revolutionary  soldier.  It  may 
be  readily  imagined  that  I  did  not  learn  from 
him  much  of  the  interior  conduct  of  the  war. 
In  my  grandfather's  diary  the  great  surrender 
is  thus  recorded :  "  October  23,  lodging  and  so 
forth,  3s.  Ride  with  Colonel  Webster's  son, 


144        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED    YEARS 

dine  at  Pembroke  (New  Hampshire)  2s  6  pence. 
Ferry  at  Penny  cook,  4.  Burgoine  surrendered 
prisoner  17th  Stop  at  Uncle  Atkinson's."  [The 
day's  ride  must  have  been  from  Portsmouth 
to  Concord.] 

As  late  as  1857  or  1858  I  knew  Mrs.  Nancy 
Brown,  a  nice  old  lady,  well  preserved,  who  must 
have  been  at  that  time  eighty-seven  years  old. 
She  told  me  that  she  was  a  North  End  girl ; 
that  the  day  of  the  Battle  of  Bunker  Hill  every 
one  who  lived  there  was,  of  course,  intensely 
excited.  The  cannon  on  Copp's  Hill  were, 
from  time  to  time,  firing  across  at  Charles- 
town  ;  the  children  must  have  seen  Charles- 
town  burning,  though  I  do  not  remember  that 
she  spoke  of  that.  But  she  did  tell  me  that 
when  the  carts  began  to  come  up  from  the 
ferry  with  the  wounded  English  soldiers,  the 
children  ran  after  the  carts  as  they  went  up 
what  are  now  Lynde  Street  and  Staniford 
Street ;  and  they  could  see  the  gouts  of  blood 
running  out  from  the  tails  of  the  carts  as  they 
stood  upon  the  roadway.  Even  in  the  hardest 
press  of  a  cab,  when  eager  to  strike  a  train 
on  the  Northern  railways,  I  never  can  drive 
through  Staniford  Street  without  thinking  of 
that  dripping  red  rain. 


THE    LAST    LEAVES    ON    THE    TREE          145 

Since  these  words  were  first  printed  I  have 
received  the  following  note  of  a  similar  tradi 
tion  from  a  Western  correspondent :  — 

"  Joseph  Dyar,  a  boy  in  Boston  at  the  time 
of  the  Battle  of  Bunker  Hill,  used  to  relate 
that  he,  with  his  brother  and  other  boys,  saw 
the  wounded  British  soldiers  carried  from  the 
boats  that  brought  them  over  from  the  battle 
field,  and  followed  the  carts  through  the 
streets,  watching  the  blood  drip  into  the 
dust." 

At  the  foot  of  Winter  Street  in  Boston,  on 
the  north  corner,  there  has  stood  since  my 
memory  a  wooden  house,  where  is  now  Tuttle's 
shoe  shop.  This  is  on  the  spot,  I  may  say  in 
passing,  where  I  first  met  John  Brown,  of 
Kansas.  The  New  England  Emigrants'  Aid 
Board  held  its  office  in  that  place  for  years. 
The  daughter  of  the  lady  who  occupied  the 
house  in  1775  told  me  that  an  English  private 
was  billeted  there  in  the  winter  before  the  siege 
of  Boston.  At  nightfall  on  the  18th  of  April 
he  came  into  the  house  for  his  kit,  his  musket, 
cartridge-boxes,  knapsack,  and  the  rest,  being 
one  of  the  detachment  which  was  ordered  out 
xinder  Colonel  Smith  for  the  surprise  intended 


VOL.    I.  —  L 


146        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

by  the  night  march  to  Concord.  The  lady  said 
to  him,  "When  shall  you  be  back,  Gibson?" 
and  Gibson  said,  "  God  knows,  madam,"  and 
bade  her  good-by.  They  never  saw  him  again. 
This  anecdote  has  some  worth,  for  it  completely 
relieves  Mrs.  General  Gage  from  the  scandal  in 
the  early  histories,  which  intimate  that  because 
she  was  an  American  by  birth  she  confided  her 
husband's  secrets  to  the  American  patriots.  If, 
in  every  house  where  a  soldier  was  billeted,  it 
was  known  at  six  o'clock  that  a  thousand  men 
were  going  out,  we  need  riot  look  to  the  Prov 
ince  House  for  the  source  of  the  information 
which  Paul  Revere  and  William  Dawes  car 
ried  out  north  and  south  at  eight  o'clock  that 
evening. 

In  the  year  1837  the  accomplished  student 
Mr.  James  Trecothick  Austin  delivered  a  lecture 
on  the  siege  of  Boston,  which  I  heard  and  which 
I  afterward  read.  It  is  a  pity  that  this  lecture 
should  not  now  be  printed.  He  had  a  good  deal 
of  local  information  which  he  had  derived  from 
survivors  of  the  Revolution.  I  remember  that 
he  said  that,  as  the  sun  went  down,  Beacon  Hill 
was  crowded  with  the  Boston  people  who  were 
quite  ignorant  of  what  had  happened  in  Middle 
sex  County  ;  that,  as  night  came  on,  they  could, 


THE   LAST    LEAVES   ON   THE   TREE          147 

see  the  flashes  of  the  muskets  of  the  returning 
British  forces  and  the  victorious  militia  as  they 
fired  upon  each  other  in  the  retreat  of  Milk  Row, 
which  we  now  call  Kirkland  Street.1 

It  is  only  a  few  years  since  the  old  stone 
powder-house  was  removed  which  stood,  in  Revo 
lutionary  days,  surrounded  with  salt  marsh, 
where  the  Cottage  Farms  bridge  now  crosses  the 
Charles  River.  When  General  Washington  was 
first  making  his  rounds  to  the  various  posts  of 
the  Continental  Army  besieging  Boston,  he 
visited  this  powder-house.  The  day  of  the  visit 
is  to  be  found  in  the  "  American  Archives."  As 
he  came  out,  the  officer  in  charge  called  him  aside 
and  said  that  he  supposed  he  understood  that 
the  kegs  of  powder  which  they  had  been  inspect 
ing  were  filled  with  black  sand.  This  had  been 
one  of  the  precautions  of  General  Ward,  who 
had  deceived  even  his  own  staff  as  to  the  amount 
of  what  is  called,  in  the  letters  of  that  time, 
"  the  essential  article."  It  is  of  this  visit  that 
the  tradition  is  that  Washington  did  not  speak 
for  an  hour  afterward.  At  that  moment,  with 
out  allowing  anything  for  the  cannonading,  he 

laln  a  barn  at  Milk  Row 

Ephraiin  Bates  and  Monroe 
And  Baker  and  Abram  and  I  made  a  bed." 


148         MEMORIES    OF    A   HUNDRED    YEARS 

had  but  nine  musket-charges  of  powder  for  each 
man  for  his  whole  army.1 

When  I  was  in  college,  Jared  Sparks,  always 
a  near  friend,  was  lecturing  on  American  history. 
I  stopped  after  a  lecture  to  ask  him  some  ques 
tion,  and  he  told  me  this  story  of  the  Battle  of 
Princeton.  I  dare  not  call  it  my  personal  touch 
with  the  Revolution,  but  it  removes  me  from  it 
by  only  one  gap.  Sparks  told  me  of  the  Mas 
sachusetts  officer,  whose  name  he  did  not  give  me, 
who  was  at  Princeton  on  the  day  of  the  battle. 
There  is  a  certain  bridge,  which  the  well-informed 
reader  will  remember,  which  it  was  important  to 
destroy.  Washington  instructed  this  Massachu 
setts  captain  to  take  a  file  of  men  and  destroy 

1  Nobody  chooses  to  care  now,  but  General  Miles,  in  an  article 
in  the  North  American  Review  in  September,  1900,  revealed  to 
the  world  the  secret  that  when  we  went  to  war  with  Spain  the 
nation  had  not  powder  enough  for  half  a  day's  supply  of  one 
pitched  battle.  Everything  in  the  invasion  of  Cuba  had  to  be 
postponed  till*  we  could  make  powder  enough  for  our  war. 
Every  home  critic,  our  excellent  friend  Mr.  Dooley,  for  instance, 
and  one  might  say  the  whole  press,  ridiculed  and  abused  the 
Government  for  its  delays.  In  truth,  the  Government  was 
waiting  until  it  had  powder  enough  to  fight  with.  It  seems  to 
me  immensely  creditable  to  the  War  Department  that  no  hint 
of  this  secret  slipped  out.  When  General  Miles  had  a  right  to 
make  it  known,  no  one  whom  I  ever  heard  of,  of  all  the  critics, 
even  read  the  articles.  I  never  saw  any  newspaper  which  con 
descended  to  mention  this  curious  fact.  The  war  was  already 
a  "  back  number."  It  was  history,  and  the  modern  theory  of 
Journalism  is  that  newspapers  have  no  business  with  history. 


THE    LAST    LEAVES    ON    THE    TREE          149 

the  bridge.  The  captain  touched  his  hat  and 
said,  "  Are  there  enough  men  ?  "  and  Washing 
ton  said,  "  Enough  to  be  cut  to  pieces."  This 
gentleman  told  Dr.  Sparks  afterward  that  as 
he  went  back  to  his  men  he  pinched  his  cheeks 
for  fear  that  they  should  see  that  he  was  pale ; 
and  they  destroyed  the  bridge.1 

1 A  courteous  correspondent  tells  me  that  the  officer  in  com 
mand  lived  to  old  age  and  often  repeated  the  anecdote.  It  was 
Captain  Varnum  of  the  Massachusetts  line.  And  my  near 
friend  and  companion  in  arms  (have  I  not  slept  under  his 
blankets?).  Dr.  Alfred  Alexander  Woodhull  gives  me  the  fol 
lowing  note  regarding  the  bridge  :  — 

"  The  bridge,  or  rather  its  stone  successor,  which  belongs 
to  the  memory  of  the  well-informed  reader  (Outlook,  Jan.  4, 
p.  39),  I  frequently  cross  in  these  days.  This  bridge,  perfectly 
strong  and  commodious,  has  lived  through  one  entire  century 
and  parts  of  two  others.  The  original  bridge  was  wooden  and 
spanned  Stony  Brook,  on  the  old  king's  road  between  New 
York  and  Philadelphia  (and  the  older  Indian  route  between 
the  Raritan  and  the  Delaware),  and  its  destruction  by  your 
Massachusetts  friend  after  the  battle  was  necessary  to  delay 
Cornwallis,  hastening  from  Trenton  to  overtake  Washington. 
It  was  cut  down,  the  last  of  the  work,  tradition  has  it,  under 
fire  from  the  approaching  British,  and  some  at  least  of  their 
rear  guard  were  immersed  in  the  icy  water.  Fortunately  the 
brook  was  in  freshet  and  Cornwallis  was  materially  delayed 
before  he  could  find  a  ford  farther  up  stream.  It  was  Mercer's 
advance  upon  this  bridge  before  the  battle,  to  break  the  line  of 
the  enemy's  communication,  that  brought  on  the  action.  He 
came  in  collision  with  British  reinforcements  en  route  to  Tren 
ton  from  Princeton,  and  to  gain  a  commanding  position  near 
by  and  let  the  bridge  go  until  that  enemy  was  defeated  was  the 
first  necessity." 


150        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

When  John  Stark  cut  off  Baum  and  his 
party  at  Bennington,  the  history  of  the  world 
changed,  if  we  may  trust  Colonel  Chesney. 
Stark  was  at  this  moment  very  angry  with  the 


JOHN  STARK. 
From  the  painting  by  U.  ^.  Tenney  after  the  Trumbull  portrait. 

Continental  Congress,  which  had  snubbed  him 
in  some  way.  He  would  not  tell  them  of  his 
victory,  but  he  wrote  to  the  government  of 
Massachusetts  and  of  New  Hampshire,  whose 
militia  he  had  commanded  at  Bennington,  and 


THE   LAST    LEAVES    ON    THE   TREE         151 

he  sent  to  Massachusetts  "  one  Hessian  gun  and 
bayonet,  one  broadsword,  one  brass-barrelled 
drum,  and  one  grenadier's  cap  taken  from  the 
enemy  in  the  memorable  battle  fought  at  Wal- 
lomsac  on  the  16th  of  August  last";  and 
requests  that  the  same  may  be  kept  "  in  com 
memoration  of  that  glorious  victory  obtained 
over  the  enemy  that  day  by  the  united  troops  of 
that  State,  those  of  New  Hampshire  and  Ver 
mont,  which  victory  ought  to  be  kept  in  memory 
and  handed  down  to  futurity  as  a  lasting  and 
laudable  example  for  the  sons  arid  daughters  of 
the  victors,  in  order  never  to  suffer  themselves 
to  become  the  prey  of  those  mercenary  tyrants 
and  British  sycophants  who  are  daily  endeavor 
ing  to  ruin  and  destroy  us." 

The  General  Court  said  in  reply :  "  These 
trophies  shall  be  safely  deposited  in  the  archives 
of  the  State,  and  there  remind  posterity  of  the 
irresistible  power  of  the  God  of  armies  and 
the  honours  due  to  the  memory  of  the  brave. 
Still  attended  with  like  successes,  may  you 
long  enjoy  the  just  rewards  of  a  grateful 
country." 

Memory  is  a  treacherous  ally.  And  I,  who 
had  often  seen  these  trophies  in  the  Senate 
chamber  in  the  Boston  State  House,  persuaded 


152         MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

myself,  before  I  was  a  man,  that  the  Hessian 
Colors  were  also  there  :  — 

"  Hang  there,  and  there,  the  dusty  rags 
Which  once  were  jaunty  battle  flags, 
And  for  a  week,  in  triumph  vain, 
Gay  flaunted  over  blue  Champlain, 
Gayly  had  circled  half  the  world, 
Until  they  drooped,  disgraced  and  furled, 

That  day  the  Hampshire  line 
Stood  to  its  arms  at  dress  parade, 
Beneath  the  Stars  and  Stripes  arrayed, 

And  Massachusetts  Pine, 
To  see  the  great  atonement  made 

By  Riedesel  and  Burgoyne." 

The  truth  of  history  requires  that  I  should  here 
acknowledge  that  Riedesel  is  really  a  word  of 
three  syllables. 

As  a  school  boy  I  used  to  take  my  sled  up  to 
the  hill  on  Boston  Common  where  the  monument 
to  the  heroes  of  the  Civil  War  now  is.  The 
redoubts  thrown  up  by  the  English  in  1775  were 
then  still  in  good  condition,  so  that  we  could 
"  play  soldier,"  if  we  chose,  in  the  protected 
trenches  behind  the  works.  These  trenches, 
however,  collected  water,  which  became  mud, 
and  since  I  have  become  a  man  the  ground  has 
been  wholly  smoothed  over. 

Lord  Percy,  afterward  the  Duke  of  Northum- 


THE   LAST   LEAVES   ON   THE   TREE          153 

berland,  was  a  young  man  of  spirit  who  com 
manded  a  brigade  of  two  or  three  regiments, 
and  was  disposed  to  teach  them  what  war  really 
was.  Instead  of  putting  them  into  quarters  for 
the  winter  of  1774-1775,  he  established  them 
in  tents  on  the  line  which  extended  from  the 
head  of  West  Street  as  it  is  now,  as  far  as  the 
parade-ground  where  Charles  Street  separates 
the  Common  from  the  Public  Garden.  He 
found  it  pretty  cold,  and  he  doubled  his  tents, 
crowding  the  spaces  between  with  hay  and 
straw.  All  this  left  a  good  deal  of  vegetable 
matter  in  the  circle  covered  by  each  tent,  of 
this  the  result  was  that  the  grass  in  those  circles 
started  earlier  in  the  spring  than  other  grass  in 
the  neighborhood.  Until  within  thirty  years 
these  circles  of  grass  could  be  distinctly  traced ; 
but  in  the  progress  of  civilization  it  has  been 
necessary  to  lay  a  flagstone  sidewalk  there,  for 
the  accommodation  of  the  people  who  used  to 
come  up  from  the  Providence  railroad  station 
to  go  to  their  business  in  Boston  every  day,  so 
that  the  circles  of  grass,  which  till  thirty  years 
ago  were  so  many  memorials  of  the  Revolution, 
have  been  destroyed. 

One   of   the    familiar   traditions    in    my   own 
family,  told  to  us  children,  was  that  my  great- 


154        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED    YEARS 

grandmother,  Mrs.  Alexander  Hill,  was  suffering 
from  an  illness  which  I  suppose  was  a  conse 
quence  of  the  hard  rations  of  the  siege.  Her 
husband,  Alexander  Hill,  went  downstairs  be 
fore  light  in  the  year  1775-1776,  and,  as  he 
opened  the  back  door  of  their  house  at  the  North 
End,  he  stumbled  across  a  bag  which  proved  to 
contain  a  bit  of  fresh  mutton.  Fresh  mutton 
was  something  which  he  and  his  household  had 
not  seen  for  months.  From  the  fresh  mutton, 
mutton  broth  was  made  for  my  great-grand 
mother  as  long  as  it  lasted. 

As  this  story  was  told  on  successive  Thanks 
giving  days,  we  children  conceived  the  vague 
impression  that  the  Angel  Gabriel  descended 
from  heaven  with  the  bag  of  mutton,  which  he 
left  at  "  Grandpa  Hill's "  door.  But,  as  time 
rolled  on,  history  revealed  the  truth  that  Major 
Moncrieffe,  who  was  an  old  brother  in  arms  of 
General  Putnam,  received  from  Putnam  a  "  pres 
ent  of  fresh  meat."  And,  on  the  31st  of  July, 
Dr.  Eliot  thanks  Daniel  Parker  for  two  quarters 
of  mutton  smuggled  in  from  Salem. 

The  charming  Murray  letters,  just  now  pub 
lished,  reveal  to  us  an  arrangement  which  is  not 
mentioned  in  the  histories.  Through  a  consider 
able  part  of  the  "Siege  of  Boston"  friends  were 


THE   LAST   LEAVES   ON    THE   TREE         155 

permitted  to  meet  under  a  flag  of  truce  on  the 
two  sides  of  Roxbury  line  at  the  neck.  Appar 
ently  you  could  send  in  a  half  a  dozen  eggs  to  a 
friend  or  could  send  out  a  paper  of  pins. 

In  January  of  1776,  Burgoyne,  who  was 
among  the  people  besieged,  wrote  a  play  which 
was  called  "  The  Blockade  of  Boston/'  and  this 
play  was  acted  by  the  British  officers  at  Faneuil 
Hall.  A  venerable  kinswoman  of  mine,  Miss 
Letitia  Baker,  told  me,  as  late  as  the  year  1835, 
that  she  went  to  Faneuil  Hall  that  night  to  see 
the  play  under  the  escort  of  an  English  officer. 
As  the  play  advanced,  a  sergeant  rushed  in,  cry 
ing,  "  The  Yankees  are  attacking  Bunker  Hill !  " 
This  seemed  a  part  of  the  play,  until  the  highest 
officer  present  came  out  saying,  "  Officers  to 
their  posts !  "  and  Miss  Letitia  Baker,  then  six 
teen  years  old,  I  believe,  had  to  find  her  way 
home  without  the  attendant  who  had  taken  her 
to  the  play. 

I  am  afraid  that  these  desultory  anecdotes,  if 
I  may  call  them  such,  of  my  personal  relations 
with  the  Revolution  must  end  when  I  say  that, 
under  the  guidance  of  that  charming  gentleman, 
Mr.  Henry  Armitt  Brown,  of  Philadelphia,  I 
visited  Valley  Forge  some  twenty  years  ago. 
The  most  interesting  thing  in  the  visit  which 


156         MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

I  recall  is  this :  that  the  fortification  by  which 
the  barracks  were  protected  from  any  sadden 
incursion  from  Philadelphia,  having  been  thrown 
up  in  the  midst  of  arable  land,  presented  a  certain 
difficulty  to  the  ploughman  in  after  years.  Of 
this,  the  consequence  is  that  a  large  square 
"  reservation,"  so  to  speak,  is  now  covered  by  a 
heavy  growth  of  woodland  which  would  all  have 
been  under  the  plough  for  a  hundred  and  twenty 
years  but  for  the  accident  that  these  works  had 
been  thrown  up  there.  So  it  happens  that  the 
forest,  now  more  than  a  century  old,  is  the  monu 
ment  of  the  Valley  Forge  encampment. 

Harrison  Gray  Otis,  Senator  of  the  State  of 
Massachusetts  in  Congress,  and  Mayor  of  Boston, 
sent  to  me,  in  the  year  1844,  on  the  17th  of  De 
cember,  these  notes :  — 

"  On  the  19th  of  April,  1775,  I  went  to  school 
for  the  last  time.  In  the  morning,  about  seven, 
Percy's  brigade  was  drawn  up,  extending  from 
Scollay  Building  [where  Scollay  Square  now  is] 
through  Tremont  Street,  nearly  to  the  bottom 
of  the  Mall  [by  this  Mr.  Otis  means  the  Mall 
of  English  elms,  and  the  "  bottom  of  the  Mall " 
means  the  head  of  West  Street],  prepared  to 
take  up  their  march  for  Lexington.  The  Cor- 


THE   LAST   LEAVES   ON   THE   TREE         157 

poral  came  up  to  me  as  I  was  going  to  school, 
and  turned  me  off,  and  told  me  to  pass  down  to 
Court  Street,  which  I  did,  and  came  up  School 
Street  to  the  schoolhouse.  [This  is  where  the 
ladies'  room  at  Parker's  now  welcomes  lunching 
people  every  day.]  It  may  be  imagined  that 
great  agitation  prevailed,  the  British  line  being 
drawn  up  a  few  yards  from  the  schoolhouse 
door.  As  I  entered  school  I  heard  the  announce 
ment,  '  Deponite  libros/  and  I  ran  home  for  fear 
of  the  regulars." 

I  forget  who  told  me  what  I  know  to  be  true, 
that  the  critical  delay  which  held  that  reenforce- 
ment  so  long  waiting  on  Common  Street,  hap 
pened  in  this  fashion,  which  shows  what  red  tape 
was  and  is  in  the  English  service.  These  troops 
were  waiting  for  the  Marines.  "  Where  are  the 
Marines,  where  are  the  Marines  !  "  Finally  the 
proper  orderly  was  found.  "  Did  you  take 
the  order  for  the  Marines  last  night  ?  "  "  Yes, 
sir,  and  I  left  it  at  Major  Pitcairn's  quarters." 
Alas,  Pitcairn  had  gone  with  the  first  detach 
ment  ;  it  was  already  four  hours  since  he  had 
given  the  order  to  fire  on  Lexington  Common, 
and  here  we  are  on  Common  Street  at  eight 
o'clock  in  the  morning,  waiting  for  somebody  at 


158      MEMORIES  OF  A  HUNDRED  YEARS 

the  North  End  to  cut  open  his  order  for  the 
Marines. 

The  coasting  scene,  almost  celebrated  in  local 
history,  belongs  on  School  Street,  where  the  sleds 
of  the  Latin  School  boys  ran  down  daily  on  the 
snow  from  the  point  where  is  now  the  Bellevue 
House,  as  far  as  Washington  Street.  General 
Haldimand  was  quartered  at  the  corner  of  what 
is  now  Province  Street.  His  servant  broke  up  the 
coast  by  putting  ashes  and  dirt  upon  it.  The 
first  class  of  the  Latin  School  waited  upon 
Haldimand,  and  told  him  that  coasting  was  one 
of  their  "inalienable  rights."  Haldimand  was 
very  civil  to  them.  He  did  not  want  to  make 
more  disturbance  than  he  could  help.  He  sent 
for  his  servant  and  scolded  him,  and  told  him  to 
put  water  on  the  coast  every  night  when  it 
would  freeze.  He  asked  the  delegation  from 
the  Latin  School  to  take  a  glass  of  wine  with 
him.  This  may  be  called  the  first  triumph  of 
the  Revolution.  The  story  of  this  interview 
was  told  to  me  in  1844  by  Jonathan  Darby 
Robins,  who  was  one  of  the  committee  who 
interviewed  Haldimand  on  this  celebrated  occa 
sion.  I  am  sorry  to  say  that  I  cannot  find  any 
reference  to  the  matter  in  Haldimand's  rather 
voluminous  correspondence. 


GEORGE   WASHINGTON 


159 


This  is  a  good  place  to  say  that  the  philolo 
gists  have  not  found  in  print  any  earlier  use  of 
coast  for  a  slide  on  a  sled  than  the  letter  of  the 
time  describing  this  interview. 


GEORGE  WASHINGTON 

I  began  these  papers  with  a  story  of  a  little 
Italian  girl  who  paid  me 
the  high  compliment  of 
asking  if  I  were  George 
Washington.  I  was  obliged 
to  confess  that  I  was  not. 
It  was  only  the  summer 
before  that  I  had  been 
reading  a  lecture  on 
"  Washington  in  Private 
Life  "  at  the  Pennsylvania 
University  in  Philadelphia. 
A  courteous  lady  joined 
me  in  the  street-car  as  we 
rode  home  and  asked  me  if  I  were  personally 
acquainted  with  my  hero.  I  was  well  pleased  at 
the  tribute  thus  paid  to  the  vividness  of  my 
pictures  of  him.  But  to  have  had  an  intimate 
conversation  with  him,  I  must  have  been  one 
hundred  and  fifteen  years  old  at  the  time  when 


GEORGE  WASHINGTON. 

From  a  rare  stipple  engraving 

after  the  Houdon  bust. 


160        MEMORIES   OF  A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

I  met  her.  I  did  not  however,  suggest  this  to 
her,  but  I  was  obliged  to  disown  her  compli 
ment,  as  afterward  I  disowned  that  of  the  little 
Italian. 

As  the  reader  will  have  to  follow  along  with 
more  or  less  memorials  of  all  the  other  Presi 
dents,  I  think  I  will  put  in  here,  as  a  sort  of 
prologue  to  the  memories  of  the  century,  some 
notes  of  different  reminiscences  of  George  Wash 
ington  which  I  have  stumbled  upon  sometimes, 
when  I  have  come  in  touch  with  people  who 
had  seen  him  and  known  him.  I  have  outlived 
the  period  when  there  was  a  determination  to 
make  him  a  demi-god,  but  that  period  continued 
well  down  the  nineteenth  century.  As  late  as 
1864  I  served  as  the  junior  member  of  a  com 
mittee  of  the  Massachusetts  Historical  Society 
which  was  to  edit  the  Heath-Washington  letters, 
owned  by  the  Society.  So  soon  as  the  com 
mittee  met  I  said  that  I  would  not  serve  unless 
we  determined  from  the  first  to  print  the  letters 
as  we  found  them,  " swear-words"  and  bad 
spelling  and  all.  We  had  fresh  in  memory  the 
discussion  between  Dr.  Sparks  and  Lord  Mahon 
as  to  Sparks'  treatment  of  the  Mss.  which  he 
had  published.  The  veteran  chairman  of  the 
committee,  my  kind  and  accomplished  friend, 


GEORGE   WASHINGTON  161 

Mr.  Thomas  Coffin  Amory,  said  at  once :  "  I 
think  Mr.  Hale  is  right.  I  think  the  time  has 
come  when  we  can  afford  to  tell  the  truth  about 
Washington."  He  really  meant  that,  at  the 
beginning  of  the  century,  it  was  better  to  hold 
up  Washington's  authority  as  that  of  a  superior 
being  —  not  to  be  discussed,  and  far  less  to  be 
doubted. 

I  am  sure  he  was  wrong.  I  have  studied 
Washington  more  carefully,  I  think,  than  I 
have  studied  any  life  except  Franklin's,  and  I 
am  sure  that  the  more  we  know  of  Washington, 
and  the  more  we  can  tell  of  him,  the  better  all 
round.  Writing,  as  I  do,  at  the  period  of  the 
Judge  Marshall  Centennial,  I  am  tempted  to  say 
that  a  careful  reading  again  of  some  of  Marshall's 
chapters  in  his  "  Life  of  Washington "  is  well 
worth  the  while  of  any  one  who  wants  to  know 
the  truth. 

As  I  lost  my  chance  of  talking  with  Washing 
ton  by  being  born  a  quarter  of  a  century  too 
late,  I  have  but  a  few  anecdotes  of  him  which 
have  not,  before  my  time,  been  put  on  paper. 
In  the  Washington  Number  of  "  Old  and  New," 
edited  by  me  and  published  in  February,  1872,  the 
student  will  find  a  few  studies  of  that  time  for 
which  it  is  worth  while  taking  down  the  volume. 

VOL.  I.  —  M 


162        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

There  is  an  account  of  Braddock's  defeat, 
where  you  would  not  look  for  it,  in  Day's  "Sand- 
ford  and  Merton,"  where  an  old  soldier  tells  the 
story,  in  1783,  observe,  to  the  prigs  who  are 
named  Tommy  Merton  and  Harry  Sandford. 
The  year  after  that  defeat  Washington  came  on 
to  Boston  for  the  first  time.  He  came  on  horse 
back,  remember,  with  two  aides,  and  four  or  five 
black  servants.  There  were  also  led  horses  to 
ride  upon  as  relays  for  the  others.  It  is  pity  of 
pities  that  the  original  diary  of  that  year,  writ 
by  his  own  hand,  has  been  "  conveyed  "  from  the 
collection  now  at  Washington.  Sparks  saw  it, 
but  made  little  use  of  it.  I  think  it  was  stolen, 
and  that  afterward  it  appeared  in  some  auction. 
And  I  print  this  in  the  hope  that  a  faithful 
reader  can  give  a  hint  as  to  where  it  is  now. 

I  will  put  in  a  parenthesis  here  what  seems  to 
me  a  good  story  about  this  valuable  lost  manu 
script.  There  was  some  suspicion  that  it  was  in 
one  of  the  great  Chicago  collections,  and  our 
friend  Mr.  Robert  Lincoln  was  kind  enough  to 
try  to  look  it  up  for  me.  But  he  did  not  suc 
ceed.  Mr.  Lincoln  told  me  that  he  did  go  to  a 
great  collector  and  ask  him  to  trace  it  for  us. 
When,  the  next  week,  he  returned  to  inquire 
about  it,  the  virtuoso  said,  "  Send  to  Mr.  Hale 


GEORGE   WASHINGTON 


163 


to  say  that  I  have  not  Washington's  diary  for 
1746,  but  that  I  shall  be  glad  to  show  him  a 
lock  of  General  Washington's  hair." 

An   enterprising   Philadelphia  publisher  once 


THE  WASHINGTON  LETTER. 


asked  me  to  furnish  for  him  twenty  original 
stories  of  Washington.  The  contract  was  too 
large  even  for  my  audacity,  and  I  had  to  decline. 
But  I  did  try  my  hand  on  starting  a  tradition, 
and  if  we  all  acknowledge  that  we  take  a  part, 
there  is  no  harm  in  handing  it  along.  I  wrote 


164        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

a  story  which  represents  Washington  with  his 
aides,  Mercer  and  Stewart,  as  clattering  along 
"  Marlboro  Street/'  now  Washington  Street,  in 
Boston,  coming  in  from  the  great  Governor 
Shirley's  house  in  Roxbury,  and  stopping  at  the 
"  Cromwell's  Head,"  in  School  Street,  then  the 
best  inn  in  town. 

(Good  doctrine,  this,  for  young  Colonel  Wash 
ington,  if,  as  people  choose  to  think,  he  was  of 
Cavalier  family.  Observe  that  this  was  one 
hundred  and  five  years  since  Charles  the  First's 
head  had  been  cut  off,  when  we  stand  under 
Cromwell's  and  give  our  bridle-rein  to  the  groom. 
Washington's  memories  of  Charles  were  about 
as  old  as  ours  of  Washington  are.) 

In  my  story,  which  the  reader  will  find  in  its 
place,  the  Latin  School  boys,  from  the  school  just 
above,  on  School  Street,  where  the  Franklin 
statue  now  stands,  come  down  to  see  the  little 
Virginian  company.  Washington  asks  one  of 
them  to  mount  his  horse.  He  sees  that  the  boy 
has  an  older  friend,  and  calls  a  black  servant 
for  a  horse  for  him,  meaning  to  take  a  short 
ride  with  them.  But,  alas !  he  is  called  into 
the  Town  House  to  meet  Shirley,  and  the 
two  Bostonians  have  to  take  their  scamper 
alone. 


GEORGE   WASHINGTON  165 

But,  half  an  hour  after,  they  all  three  meet 
again  under  Cromwell's  Head. 

"Have  you  enjoyed  your  ride?"  the  Virginia 
Colonel  asks  them. 

"  Oh,  certainly,"  says  the  boy,  who  proves  to 
be  Josiah  Quincy.  "  We  went  right  up  to  the 
Common,  and  I  made  Mr.  Hancock  ride  three 
times  round  the  Wishing  Stone.  And,  Colonel 
Washington,  what  you  wish  there  will  certainly 
come  to  pass." 

"  And  what  did  you  wish  ? "  asked  the  Vir 
ginia  Colonel,  laughing. 

The  boy  blushed,  but  he  answered  bravely, 
"  I  wished  that  all  the  Continental  troops  might 
be  in  one  great  army,  and  that  Colonel  Wash 
ington  may  be  Commander-in-Chief." 

They  all  laughed  heartily,  and  Mercer,  who 
had  joined  them,  laughed  as  well.  And  Wash 
ington  said,  "And  I  will  wish  that  our  friend 
Mr.  Hancock  here  may  be  President  of  the  Con 
tinental  Assembly,  when  that  grand  day  comes 
round." 

Now  there  are  many  stories  in  Plutarch  which 
have  no  more  foundation  than  this.  There  is  no 
proof  that  this  is  false,  so  let  us  hope  that  it  is 
true.  To  the  New  York  Observer,  with  which 
I  have  an  old  battle  on  this  point,  I  will  observe 


166        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 


that  the  story  belongs  to  a  class  of  literature 
sometimes  called  "  parable "  and  sometimes 
fiction. 

It  was  on  this  journey  that  Washington  fell 
in  love  with  Mary  Philipse,  who  married,  not 
George  Washington,  alas !  but  Colonel  Morris, 

who  had  been, 
like  Washington, 
an  aid  of  Brad- 
dock's.  Not  many 
years  ago  I  vis 
ited  the  Braddock 
battle-ground, 
through  which 
the  Pennsylva 
nia  Railroad  now 
runs.  As  you  go 
from  Bessemer  to 
Braddock,  a  few 
miles  from  Pitts- 
burg,  you  pass 
through  the  scene  of  the  Braddock  massacre. 
From  this  place  I  took  the  train  home,  to  find 
on  my  table,  of  course,  a  note  from  an  English 
correspondent,  asking  me  if  nobody  wanted 
pretty  Mary  Philipse's  picture  —  picture  by 
Copley,  observe.  I  tried  to  make  the  Yonkers 


MARY  PHILIPSE. 
From  an  engraving  by  J.  Rogers. 


GEORGE   WASHINGTON  167 

people  buy  it,  but  they  did  not  "  seem  to  want 
it."  And  I  suppose  the  picture  is  in  England 
still.  Another  portrait  of  Mary  Philipse,  also 
by  Copley,  is  preserved  in  this  country.  This 
is  the  picture  followed  in  our  engraving.1 

Governor  Edward  Everett  awakened  a  new 
enthusiasm  for  Washington  by  his  oration  which 
he  delivered  everywhere  in  1856  and  later.  The 
object,  as  publicly  announced,  was  to  raise  money 
for  the  purchase  of  Mount  Vernon  ;  and  in  this 
enterprise  he  succeeded.  The  estate  is  now  the 
Nation's,  and  one  likes  to  say  that  everything  in 
the  arrangement  of  the  home  itself  is  just  what 
we  could  wish.  His  own  wish,  everywhere 
freely  expressed,  was  to  make  one  effort  for 
uniting  in  a  matter  of  sentiment  the  Northern 
and  Southern  people,  who  were  so  hopelessly 
divided  in  politics.  It  was  his  one  last  effort 
to  reconcile  the  two. 

His  "  Life  of  Washington,"  published  in  the 
same  interest  at  the  same  time,  contains  a  good 
deal  of  what  he  had  himself  picked  up  in  con 
versation  and  elsewhere.  His  father,  my  grand- 

1  That  picture  is  now  the  property  of  Mr.  Amherst  Morris, 
great-grandson  of  Colonel  Roger  Morris  and  Mary  Philipse, 
whom  Morris  married.  He  was  one  of  Braddock's  aids  at  the 
battle,  and  was  wounded  there.  Our  picture  follows  an  en 
graving  by  J.  Rogers. 


168        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

father,  had  delivered  an  oration  on  Washington 
in  1800,  when  the  whole  country  was  mourning 
him,  just  after  his  death.  In  this  address  I 
found  the  suggestive  and  important  statement 
that  so  thoroughly  did  Washington  reckon  him 
self  a  citizen  of  the  country,  and  bound  by  the 
duties  and  habits  of  the  Virginia  country  gentle 
man,  that  after  he  had  retired  from  the  Presi 
dency  of  the  Nation,  he  served  once  at  least  as 
foreman  of  a  jury  in  the  regular  business  of  the 
county  court. 

It  is  with  some  hesitation  that  I  add  here, 
what  I  am  afraid  is  true,  though  I  never  heard 
it  said  aloud  until  the  year  1901.  It  belongs 
with  the  discussion  as  to  the  third  term  for  the 
Presidency.  The  statement  now  is  that  Wash 
ington  did  not  permit  his  name  to  be  used  for  a 
third  election  because  he  had  become  sure  that 
he  could  not  carry  the  State  of  Virginia  in  the 
election.  He  would  undoubtedly  have  been 
chosen  by  the  votes  of  the  other  States,  but  he 
would  have  felt  badly  the  want  of  confidence 
implied  in  the  failure  of  his  own  "  country,"  as 
he  used  to  call  it  in  his  earlier  letters,  to  vote 
for  him.  It  is  quite  certain,  from  the  corre 
spondence  of  the  time,  that,  as  late  as  Septem 
ber  of  the  year  1796,  the  year  in  which  John 


GEORGE   WASHINGTON  169 

Adams  was  chosen  President,  neither  Adams 
nor  Washington  knew  whether  Washington 
meant  to  serve  a  third  time. 

I  have  been  assured  by  gentlemen  who  lived 
in  northern  Virginia  that  the  universal  impres 
sion  there  was  that  the  slaves  of  the  Washington 
plantation  hurried  Martha  Washington's  death 
because  their  own  liberty  was  secured,  by  Wash 
ington's  will,  after  her  death.  I  do  not  believe 
that  this  bad  statement  can  be  authenticated. 
But  there  is  no  doubt,  I  believe,  that  Madison 
had  made  a  similar  will  liberating  his  slaves 
after  Mrs.  Madison's  death,  and  that  he  changed 
his  will  on  account  of  this  rumor  with  regard  to 
the  Washington  slaves. 

Mr.-  Everett  told  me  that  Colonel  Pickering 
told  him  that  Washington's  hand  was  the  larg 
est  hand  which  he  remembered  to  have  particu 
larly  noticed.  I  suppose  the  anecdote  is  in 
print,  but  I  heard  it  in  conversation,  which 
gives  the  detail  of  his  anger  at  Monmouth 
when  he  met  General  Lee.  Washington  asked 
him  why  such  a  column  was  retiring,  and  Lee 
said  that  the  American  troops  would  not  stand 
the  British  bayonets.  Washington  replied, 
"  You  damned  poltroon,  you  have  never  tried 
them ! "  As  this  relates  to  the  exact  truth  of 


170        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

the  battle,  the  story  seems  probable.  Since 
printing  this  anecdote  I  have  a  note  which  gives 
the  detail  of  the  story  as  told  by  an  eye-witness.1 
Hannibal  Hamlin,  the  Vice-President  with 
Abraham  Lincoln,  told  me  that  when  he  entered 
Congress  in  1842  there  were  Virginians  still  there 
who  knew  Washington  personally.  They  said 
that  the  neighbors  regarded  him  as  a  clear 
headed,  sensible  man,  whose  opinion  was  worth 
having,  and  who  was  well  worth  consulting  in 
farming  matters  or  in  common  business.  He 
thought  that  in  Washington's  later  years  this 
neighborly  feeling  quite  overruled  the  estimate 
which  the  same  people  had  of  his  service  to  the 
country. 

1  "  David  Breading  was  temporary  aide  to  General  Maxwell 
at  Monmouth,  New  Jersey.  Maxwell  sent  Breading  to  find 
General  Washington,  and  to  report  to  him  Lee's  action  in  re 
treating  when  Washington  had  ordered  otherwise.  He  found 
Washington,  and  the  General  said  to  him  :  '  Young  man,  can 
you  lead  me  to  General  Lee  ? '  Breading  replied  that  he  could. 
The  General  said  :  '  Lead  on,  and  I  will  follow.'  They  went 
at  furious  speed,  and  found  General  Lee.  Washington  said: 
'Why  have  you  acted  thus?'  and  swore  at  him  in  no  mild 
terms.  My  grand-uncle,  David  Breading,  narrated  this  to  me, 
himself  being  the  actor. 

"As  Mr.  Hogg  and  his  ancestors  were  good  church  mem 
bers,  perhaps  the  damned  poltroon  of  your  anecdote  may  be  the 
"no  mild  terms"  of  their  recollection.  When  one  considers 
the  provocation,  it  would  seem  easy  to  pardon  the  Father  of  his 
Country  had  he  used  some  very  much  stronger  imprecations." 
—  From  a  note  by  Dr.  WoodhulL 


Procession. 


BOSTO*.   OCT.    49,«   1789. 

AS  this  town  is  shortly  to  be  honoured  with  a  visit  from  THE  PRESIDENT  of  the  United  States: 
In  order  that  we  may  pay  our  respects  to  him,  in  a  manner   whereby  every  inhabitant  may  see  so 
illustrious  and  amiable  a  character,  and  to  prevent  the  disorder  and  danger  which  must  ensue  from 
a  great  assembly  of  people  without  order,  a  Committee  appointed  by  a  respectable  number  of  in 
habitants,  met  for  the  purpose,  recommend  to  their  Fellow-Citizens  to  arrange  themselves  in  the  following  or 
der,  in  a 


PEOCESSIO 


Ir  is  also  recommended,  that  the  person  who  shall  be  chosen  as  head  of  each  order  of  Artizans,  Trades 
men,  Manufacturers,  &c.  shall  be  known  by  displaying  a  WHITE  FLAG,  with  some  device  thereon  expres 
sive  of  their  several  callings,  and  to  be  numbered  as  in  the  arrangement  that  follows,  which  is  alphabetically  dis 
posed,  in  order  to  give  general  satisfaction. — The  Artizans,  &c.  to  display  such  insignia  of  their  craft,  as  they 
can  conveniently  carry  in  their  hands.  That  uniformity  mav  not  be  wanting,  it  is  desired  that  the  several 
Flag-staffs  be  SEVEN  feet  long,  and  the  Flags  a  TABD  SQUARE. 

ORDER  OF  PROCESSION 

No.  17. 
No.  18. 
No.  19. 

No.  20. 
No.  31. 
No.  89. 

No.  23. 
No.  24. 
No.  25. 
No.  26. 
No.  27. 
No.  28. 
No.  29. 
No.  30. 
No.  31. 
No.  32. 
No,  33. 
No.  34, 
\  No.  39. 
*  No.  36. 
No.  37. 
No,  88. 
No.  39. 
No.  40. 
No.  41. 
No.  42. 
No.  43. 
No.  44. 
No.  4* 

.     .  Mo.  46. 

Seamen, 

s  omitted— from  the  idea,   that  they  would  incorporate  themselves  with  the  branches 

mentioned,  to  which  they  are  generally  attached.     For  instance-it  is  supposed,  that  under  the  head  of  BlaehmiOu.  the  Armourers,  Cutlers, 
•Whitesmiths  and  other  workers  in  iron,  would  be  included  ;  and  the  same  with  respect  to  other  trades. 

EACH  division  of  the  above  arrangement  is  requested  to  meet  on  such  parade/as  it  may  agree  on,  and  march  into  the  Mall— No.  1  of  the 
Artizans,  8tc.  forming  at  the  South-end  thereof.  The  Marshalls  will  then  direct  in  what  manner  the  Procession  will  move  to  meet  the 
President  on  his  arrival  in  town.  >Vhea  the  front  of  the  Procession  arrives  at  the  extremity  of  the  town,  it  will  halt,  and  the  whole  will 
then  be  directed  to  open  Ihe  column— one  half  of  each  rank  moving  to  the  right,  aud  the  other  half  to  the  left— and  then  face  inwards,  so  at 
to  form  an  avenue  through  which  the  President  is  to  pass,  to  the  galeries  to  be  erected  at  tae  State-House. 

Iris  requested  that  the  several  School-masters  conduct  their  Scholars  to  the  neighbourhood  of  the  State-House,  tad  form  them  in  such 
order  as  the  Marshalls  shall  direct. 
THS  Marine  Society  is  desired  to  appoint  some  person  to  arrange  end  accompany  the  s 


MUSICK. 

Goldsmiths  and  Jewellers, 

The  Selectmen, 

Hair-Dressers,                     .                        . 

Overseers  of  the  Poor. 

Hatters  and  Furrier!, 

TOWD  Treasurer, 

House  Carpenters,        ... 

Town  Clerk, 

Leather  Dressers,  am]  Leather  Breeches  ) 

Magistrates, 
Consuls  of  France  and  Holland, 
The  Officers  of  his  MosuChristia 

i  Majesty's  Squadron* 

Makers,            .           .           ^           \ 
Limners  and'Portrait  Painters. 

The  Rev.  Clergy, 

Mnst-makers, 

Physicians, 

Mathematical  Instrument-maKcrs, 

Lawyers, 

Millers,                .... 

Merchant!  and  Trader*, 

Painter  

Marine  Society, 

Paper  Stairter», 

Masters  of  Vessels, 
Revenue  Officers, 

Pewterers,                .            .            . 
Printers,  Book-biftden  and  Stationers, 

Strangers,  who  may  wish  to  alter 

d. 

Rigors, 

Bakers,                  .            • 

No.  1. 

Rope-makers, 

Blacksmiths,  &c.        . 

No.  2. 

Saddlers.              .... 

Block-maken, 

»          No'.  3. 

Sail-makers,            ... 

Boat.builders, 
Cabinet  and  Chair-makcrs,        . 

«.    '                 No.  4. 
No.  5. 

Shipwrights,  to  include  Caulkers,  Ship-join 
Head-builders  »nd  Sawyers, 

Card-  makers, 

No.  6. 

Sugai-boilers, 

Carvers, 

No.  r. 

Tallow.Chandtcrs,  &e> 

Chaise  and  Coach-makers, 

No.  8. 

Tanner  

Clock  and  Watch-makers, 

No.  9. 

Taylors,.             . 

Coopers. 

No.  10. 

Tin-plate  Workers, 

Coppersmiths,  Braziers  and  Foil 
Cordwainers.&c. 

ndcr>,       •         No.  11. 
.    No.  12. 

Tobacconists, 
Truckmen,            .            •            •            • 

Distillers, 

No.  13. 

Turners,,        ...» 

Duck  Manufacturers,. 
Engravers, 

No.  14. 
No.  15. 

Upholsterers, 
Wharfingers,                      •            •          • 

Glaziers  and  Plumbers. 

No,  16. 

Wheelwright*, 

the  above  arrangement,  some  trades 


THE  BULLETIN  ISSUED  ON  THE  OCCASION  OF  WASHINGTON'S  ENTRANCE 
INTO  BOSTON  IN  1789. 


GEORGE   WASHINGTON  173 

Our  dear  old  Josiah  Quincy,  college  president 
when  I  was  an  undergraduate,  was  one  of  John 
Hancock's  aides  when  Washington  came  to  Bos 
ton  in  1789.  When  he  was  ninety  years  old, 
Mr.  Quincy  told  me  that,  in  one  way  and  an 
other,  he  frequently  saw  Washington  in  the  days 
when  he  was  in  Boston.  Quincy  had  to  render 
to  him  the  fit  courtesies  of  the  State.  He  said 
that  although  Washington  had  then  had  very 
wide  experience  in  life,  there  appeared,  mixed 
in  with  the  manners  of  a  perfect  gentleman,  a 
certain  shyness,  such  as  you  might  see  in  any 
man  who  lived  a  good  deal  without  the  society 
of  other  people.  "Exactly,"  Mr.  Quincy  said, 
"  as  you  have  met  a  fine  country  gentleman 
from  one  of  the  smaller  towns  who  was  spend 
ing  the  winter  in  the  Legislature  at  Boston." 
He  implied,  that  is,  that  in  Washington's  per 
sonal  manner,  while  he  quite  understood  the 
important  dignity  of  his  position  as  President, 
there  lingered  still  the  traces  of  what  might 
be  called  the  shyness  of  the  life  of  a  plantation. 
I  am  almost  sure  that  Mr.  Quincy  used  the 
word  "  shyness." 

An  old  parishioner  of  mine  once  told  me  that 
the  day  when  Washington  entered  Boston  in  tri 
umph, —  that  is,  on  the  17th  of  March,  1776,  he 


174        MEMORIES   OF  A  HUNDRED   YEARS 

took  up  his  headquarters  at  the  best  public  house 
in  Boston,  which  was  at  the  head  of  State  Street, 
until  then  called  King  Street.  According  to  my 
old  friend's  account,  General  Howe  had  occupied 
the  same  inn.  The  mother  of  my  informant 
was  the  daughter  of  the  keeper  of  the  inn,  and 
was  a  little  girl  playing  about  the  house,  and,  of 
course,  interested  in  all  that  passed.  Washing 
ton,  with  his  usual  kindness  to  children,  called 
the  child  to  him  and  said,  "  You  have  seen  the 
soldiers  on  both  sides ;  which  do  you  like  best  ?  " 
The  little  girl  could  not  tell  a  lie  any  more  than 
he  could,  and,  with  a  child's  frankness,  she  said 
she  liked  the  redcoats  best.  Washington  laughed, 
according  to  my  friend's  story,  and  said  to  her, 
"Yes,  my  dear,  the  redcoats  do  look  the  best, 
but  it  takes  the  ragged  boys  to  do  the  fighting." 
This  is  one  of  many  well-authenticated  anecdotes 
which  disprove  the  old  demigod  theory  that 
Washington  never  smiled. 

Every  new  biography  of  Washington  is  better 
and  better,  because  it  reveals  him  to  us  as  a  man, 
and  he  is  no  longer  a  demigod.  On  another 
page  is  an  autograph  from  a  letter  which  has 
never  been  published.  Older  readers  must  ex 
cuse  what  may  interest  younger  readers  —  the 
little  history  of  this  particular  scrap  of  writing. 


GEORGE   WASHINGTON  175 

I  was  sitting  one  night,  when  I  had  nothing  bet 
ter  to  do,  examining  and  destroying  old  papers 
of  ray  father's.  I  came  to  an  old  letter,  in  a 
handwriting  which  I  did  not  remember,  which 
seemed  like  an  article  on  the  character  of  Wash 
ington.  I  said  to  myself,  "  Surely,  if  papa  did 
not  choose  to  print  this  ten  years  ago,  I  need 
not  save  it  now."  I  crushed  the  paper  in  my 
hand  to  throw  it  into  the  fire,  wThen  the  signa 
ture  which  the  reader  sees  arrested  my  eye,  and 
I  found  that  the  letter  which  I  had  been  criticis 
ing  enclosed  an  autograph  of  Washington  which 
a  Virginia  friend  had  thought  my  father  would 
like  to  see.  So  near  did  I  come  to  destroying 
the  autograph!  Moral.  —  Eemember  the  Chi 
nese  law :  that  no  piece  of  paper  with  writing 
upon  it  should  ever  be  destroyed. 


THE   VIRGINIAN   DYNASTY 


VOLc  I.  —  ] 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE   VIRGINIAN   DYNASTY 
THOMAS   JEFFERSON 

I  HAVE  already  quoted  from  my  grandfather's 
diary  the  words  which  seemed  to  him  big  with 
fate,  "  T.  Jeffer 
son  chosen  Presi 
dent  U.  S.,"  and 
big  with  fate  they 
were.  My  grand 
father,  a  fine  leader 
of  the  people  in 
the  fashion  of  his 
time,  thought  that 
dangers  untold  be 
gan  for  the  United 
States  in  that 
moment.  He  was 
right  enough  in 
thinking  so.  But  he  did  not  understand,  and 
it  seems  to  me  that  for  five  and  twenty  years 
nobody  understood,  that  this  country  governs 

179 


THOMAS  JEFFERSON. 
After  a  painting  by  Bouch. 


180        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

itself,  and  that  the  backward  and  forward 
moves  of  Cabinets  and  Congresses  have  not,  in 
general,  a  critical  importance  in  the  history 
of  the  country.  They  are  by  no  means  of 
that  critical  importance  which  the  liveried  ser 
vants  of  the  country  think  they  are.  I  have 
said  this  already,  but  I  shall  often  say  it  again, 
whenever  any  one  gives  me  a  chance. 

The  men  who  made  the  Constitution  builded 
better  than  they  knew,  perhaps.  Whether  they 
knew  it  or  not,  they  made  such  arrangements 
that  the  American  People  governs  America. 
True,  there  are  people  in  America  who  are  con 
stantly  harking  back  to  the  supposed  analogy 
between  their  President  and  the  sovereign  King, 
between  their  Cabinet  and  an  English  Cabinet. 
Now,  it  is  hopeless  to  undeceive  Europe  on  this 
subject.  Every  writer  on  the  Continent  of 
Europe  supposes  that  Mr.  McKinley  was  a 
king,  or  that  Martin  Van  Buren  was  a  king. 
But  on  this  side  of  the  ocean  we  ought  to 
know  that  every  one  of  the  Presidents  has  been 
the  servant  of  the  American  people. 

Undoubtedly  Thomas  Jefferson,  without  mean 
ing  to  inflict  a  serious  injury  on  the  fortunes  of 
the  young  Nation,  really  thought  he  was  to  be 
a  sort  of  king.  But  the  young  Nation  was  so 


THOMAS   JEFFERSON  181 

much  stronger  than  he  was  that,  after  he  became 
President,  he  really  fills  the  place  in  history 
which  a  fussy  and  foolish  nurse  fills  in  the  biog 
raphy  of  a  man  like  Franklin,  or  Washington, 
or  Goethe,  or  Julius  Caesar,  of  whom  the  nurse 
had  the  charge.  It  is  interesting  in  a  fashion 
to  know  whether  Master  Julius  Caesar  wore  his 
baby  clothes  six  months  longer  than  he  should 
have  done  under  our  practice,  but,  as  it  appears 
when  you  read  his  own  life,  this  has  not  proved 
a  very  important  matter.  In  the  same  way  it  is 
interesting  to  know  how  much  fuss  and  how 
much  folly  there  was  in  Jefferson's  pretended 
oversight  of  the  infant  Nation,  but  when  you  see 
that  apparently  without  his  knowledge  Fulton 
and  Livingston  were  revolutionizing  the  world, 
that  Eli  Whitney  was  revolutionizing  the  world, 
that  the  pioneers  in  the  Valley  of  the  Mississippi 
were  creating  the  history  of  to-day,  that  in  spite 
of  Jefferson  and  his  policy  the  infant  navy  of 
the  United  States  was  forming  itself  and  that 
her  immense  maritime  commerce  was  coming 
into  being,  it  is  impossible  to  think  that  Jeffer 
son's  administration  had  that  crowning  impor 
tance  in  history  which  his  older  admirers  claimed 
for  him. 

To  tell  the  whole  truth,  the  history  of  what  I 


182        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

like  to  call  the  Virginia  Dynasty,  their  failures 
and  follies,  their  fuss  and  feathers  and  fol-de-rol, 
for  the  first  quarter  of  a  century,  never  got  itself 
written  down  until  twelve  years  ago.  Mr. 
Henry  Adams  then  published  his  very  entertain 
ing  history  of  the  years  between  1801  and  1817. 
The  more  prominent  actors  in  that  period  were 
skilful  in  covering  their  tracks,  and  have  done 
so  curiously  well.  Such  books  as  Hildreth's 
book  on  the  outside  history  of  America  —  let  me 
say  modestly,  such  chapters  as  my  own  in  the 
"  People's  History  "  —  were  therefore  made  up 
only  from  public  documents  and  from  the  super 
ficial  contemporary  view  in  the  wretched  news 
papers  of  twenty-five  years.  This  is  the  reason 
why  our  printed  histories  of  the  generation  be 
fore  our  own  are  neither  correct  nor  interesting, 
nor  in  any  sort  important  until  we  come  down 
to  18 6 1.1  Into  this  circle  of  chattering  crickets 
there  steps  Mr.  Henry  Adams.  He  is  the  son 
of  a  great  statesman,  who  is  the  son  of  another 
great  statesman,  who  is  the  son  of  another  great 
statesman,  and  all  of  his  ancestors  have  left 
behind  them  full  materials  for  history.  Mr. 
Adams  has  lived,  perhaps  in  an  official  capacity, 

1 1  will  speak  at  more  length  of  this  in  Vol.  II.,  Chap.  II.,  in 
referring  to  the  historians. 


THOMAS   JEFFERSON  183 

certainly  with  the  respect  deserved  by  such  men, 
in  the  principal  capitals  of  Western  Europe. 
He  has  had  ready  access  to  the  confidential  cor 
respondence  of  English,  French,  and  Spanish 
diplomatic  agents  for  the  time  of  which  he  writes. 
In  our  own  Department  of  State  he  is,  of  course, 
a  welcome  guest.  And  now,  with  a  charming 
and  pitiless  impartiality,  he  draws  all  curtains 
back  and  reveals  to  us  the  frenzies,  the  follies, 
the  achievements,  and  the  failures  of  what 
people  call  the  "  government "  between  1800 
and  1817. 

I  have  read  many  novels  as  the  last  ten  years 
have  gone  by,  but  not  one  of  them  is  so  amusing 
as  is  this  record  of  people  who  were  trying  to 
persuade  themselves  that  they  were  great  men, 
and  even  thought  they  were.  In  Mr.  Adams's 
nine  volumes,  if  my  young  friends  the  historical 
novelists  of  to-day  only  knew  it,  there  is  material 
for  endless  comedies  which  are  not  yet  written. 

But  the  United  States  is  absolutely  convinced 
that  the  Nation  is  always  right  in  what  it  under 
takes.  It  must  be  confessed,  also,  that  our  habit 
of  looking  forward  is  so  certainly  fixed  that  our 
people  care  very  little  for  their  history.  They 
hardly  care  for  it  at  all.  And  so  it  happens 
that  Mr.  Adams's  History  is  passed  by  as  you 


184         MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

might  pass  by  annals  of  the  court  intrigues  of 
Hugh  Capet.  This  is  partly  because  it  is  new, 
partly  because  it  is  true,  but  mostly  because  it  is 
all  so  far  back  in  time  as  to  come  under  the 
head  of  a  "  back  number,"  to  borrow  one  of  the 
expressions  of  our  modern  slang.  His  revela 
tions  make  it  clear  that  the  work  of  Jefferson's 
regime  and  of  Madison's  and  of  the  Congresses 
which  met  in  their  time  wa,s  almost  always 
foolish  or  frivolous.  But  who  cares  ?  It  is  all 
eighty  or  ninety  years  ago.  This  revelation 
has  been  printed,  published,  and  passed  by  with 
only  the  very  slightest  attention  on  the  part 
of  the  general  reader. 

One  does  notice,  with  a  certain  interest  that 
since  Mr.  Adams's  volumes  were  published,  the 
old-fashioned  indiscriminate  praise  of  Jefferson 
has  almost  ended.  In  truth,  there  is  hardly  a 
recommendation  of  his  from  1801  to  1826  which 
anybody  likes  to  quote.  The  annexation  of 
Louisiana  is  the  one  great  triumph  of  his  admin 
istration;  and  he  himself  would  not  have  pre 
tended  that  he  had  sought  for  this.  It  was 
greatness  thrust  upon  him. 

But  I  suppose  we  ought  to  insert  here  a  few 
dates  and  forgotten  names,  if  it  is  only  to  pro 
pitiate  Miss  Jerusha  Dryasdust,  the  accomplished 


THOMAS  JEFFERSON  185 

principal  of  the  high  school  in  New  North  No- 
landville,  when  the  first  class  takes  "  History  in 
thirteen  lessons."  All  she  wants  is  dates  and 
names. 

This  calendar  may  briefly  run  thus  :  — 

"1803.  The  Texan,  Phil.  Nolan,  killed  by 
the  Spaniards,  and  nobody  at  Washington  cares. 

"  1805.  Jefferson's  second  Presidency.  Elec 
toral  vote,  162  to  14. 

"1805.  Burr  sails  down  the  Mississippi  for 
the  first  time. 

"  1806,  1807.     Berlin  and  Milan  Decrees. 

"  1807,  1808.     English  Orders  in  Council. 

"June,  1807.  The  English  frigate  Leopard 
fires  on  the  American  ship  Chesapeake,  and 
takes  four  seamen  from  her. 

"  December,  1807.  Jefferson's  Embargo,  which 
paralyzes  the  commerce  and  agriculture  of  the 
country  for  a  year.  It  lasted  for  the  first  nine 
months  of  1808." 

With  such  abject  disgraces  Jefferson's  second 
reign  ends  and  Madison's  begins.  Jefferson 
retires  to  his  home  at  Monticello,  and  thinks  he 
is  going  to  run  the  country  from  behind  a  screen, 
as  an  Italian  runs  Punch. 

But  no! 


186        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 


JAMES   MADISON:   AN   UNWRITTEN- 
TRAGEDY 

Poor  James  Madison !     The  best  fitted  of  any 
of  the  Virginian  Presidents  between  1801  and 


JAMES  MADISON. 
After  the  portrait  by  Gilbert  Stuart. 

1825 !  A  man  of  genius,  learning,  wisdom, 
integrity !  A  man  to  whom  the  country  was 
immensely  indebted  for  what  he  did  in  making 
the  Constitution  and  in  securing  its  adoption. 
He  became  President ;  and  an  ambitious  man  of 


JAMES   MADISON  187 

his  ability  might  well  be  proud  of  this.  And 
now  his  administration  stands  in  history  as  all 
mixed  up  with  futile  politics,  with  a  useless  war, 
which  includes  his  own  flight  from  his  own 
capital ;  a  war  only  not  disgraceful  to  the  coun 
try.  Poor  Mr.  Madison ! 

As  for  "  poor  Mr.  Madison,"  I  have  been  for 
twenty  years  trying  to  find  some  young  drama 
tist  who  would  make  for  us  a  historical  tragedy 
out  of  the  details  of  the  crisis  of  his  life.  Even 
Mr.  Stephen  Phillips  might  be  willing  to  handle 
such  a  theme.  Here  is  a  wise  man,  a  patriot, 
well  equipped,  well  surrounded,  ambitious,  old 
enough,  young  enough.  He  has  all  the  external 
conditions  which  a  man  need  have,  in  the  shape 
of  houses,  bread  and  butter,  and  a  sky  over  his 
head,  and  money  in  the  bank ;  and,  in  general, 
good  surroundings.  And  he  is  born  in  Virginia, 
which  has  taken  upon  herself,  what  nobody  else 
cared  for  much,  the  administration  of  the  new 
Nation. 

All  this  seems  very  fine.  It  is  very  fine  for 
the  moment.  The  only  bitter  drop  in  the  cup  is 
a  drop  which  all  men  have  always  found  bitter. 
For  James  Madison  is  eight  years  younger  than 
Thomas  Jefferson.  (Note  eight  years,  all  astrol 
ogers  and  wiseacres  and  Girondists  of  whatever 


188        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

type.)  And  Thomas  Jefferson  is  in  the  saddle ; 
and  James  Madison  is  the  Fitz-Eustace  to  his 
Marmion.  Poor  James !  He  can  write  as  well 
as  his  chief,  or  better ;  his  armor  is  as  good,  or 
better.  There  are  who  say  his  horse  is  as  good 
as  the  chief's,  or  better.  He  knows  more  than 
the  chief,  and  he  thinks  he  can  do  as  well  as  the 
chief,  or  better.  But  that  cursed  misfortune  of 
the  eight  years  compels  him  for  a  certain  eight 
years,  between  1801  and  1809,  to  run  on  that 
chief's  errands  and  to  do  what  the  chief  says; 
to  pull  the  chief  out  of  countless  scrapes,  and  to 
take  the  responsibility  for  the  chief's  dreams  or 
fancies  or  blunders.  History  is  full  of  such 
miseries.  It  is  like  poor  Lord  North  having  to 
conceal  the  craziness  of  his  young  King,  before 
1770;  and  that  is  one  of  the  most  tragical  things 
in  history. 

Now,  here  is  the  point  which  the  dramatist  is 
to  see :  in  1809  Thomas  Jefferson  retires  and 
James  Madison  becomes  President.  Dear  good 
soul,  he  thinks  that  at  last  he  is  going  to  have 
his  own  way.  He  is  fifty-eight  years  old,  five 
years  more  before  the  grand  climacteric,  which 
is  very  near  the  prime  of  a  man's  life.  The 
Constitution  which  he  has  interpreted  on  paper 
is  to  be  interpreted  in  fact,  as  he  reigns.  He 


JAMES   MADISON  189 

moves  into  the  White  House,  and  so  Fitz-Eustace 
mounts  Marmion's  horse.  He  proposes  to  forget 
this  wretched  vassalage  of  the  past  and  to  step 
forth  a  freeman  on  the  enterprises  before  him. 

But  just  at  that  moment  a  set  of  young  bloods 
from  the  West  and  South  surround  him.  They 
have  no  care  for  history.  The  young  American 
never  cares  for  history,  as  I  have  said  already. 
They  tell  him  that  this  and  this  is  to  be  done 
thus  and  so.  They  tell  him  that  they  mean  to 
fight  England,  and  that,  as  God  lives,  he  must 
fight  England.  They  tell  him  that  he  shall  be 
President  of  the  United  States  for  another  term 
only  if  they  and  theirs  choose  that  he  shall  be 
President  of  the  United  States.  So  this  poor 
Secretary  of  State  for  Thomas  Jefferson,  when 
he  flatters  himself  that  for  once  he  is  going  to 
give  his  own  dinner-party  and  ask  his  own 
guests,  finds  that  Henry  Clay  and  John  Cald- 
well  Calhoun  and  a  group  of  other  young  gen 
tlemen  of  thirty  years  of  age,  more  or  less,  who 
have  the  country  behind  them,  are  to  dictate  to 
him  the  policy  of  his  administration ;  and  that 
he  is  to  obey  them  for  the  last  half  of  his  life 
as  he  obeyed  Mr.  Thomas  Jefferson  for  the  eight 
years  before. 

This  reminds  one  of  the  amusing  story  which 


190        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

the  banker,  Abraham  Mendelssohn,  the  father 
of  Felix  Mendelssohn,  used  to  tell  of  himself. 
He  said  that  while  he  was  a  young  man,  indeed 
while  he  was  well  forward  in  middle  life,  people 
introduced  him  as  the  son  of  Dr.  Moses  Mendels 
sohn  — "  You  will  like  to  know  the  son  of 
the  great  Dr.  Mendelssohn."  The  great  Dr. 
Mendelssohn,  forgotten,  I  am  sorry  to  say,  by 
this  reader,  was  the  great  metaphysician  of 
those  days.  All  of  a  sudden,  however,  as  this 
good  Mr.  Abraham  Mendelssohn  walked  the 
same  streets,  people  began  to  introduce  him  as 
the  father  of  Mendelssohn  —  "  You  will  be  glad 
to  know  the  father  of  our  great  musician."  So 
my  poor  James  Madison,  after  having  been  Fitz- 
Eustace  of  Marmion,  just  as  he  approaches  his 
grand  climacteric,  finds  that  he  is  to  run  the 
errands  of  Mr.  Calhoun  and  Mr.  Clay. 

Is  not  this  tragic  ?  And  in  your  drama  here 
is  the  climax,  such  as  hardly  any  student  of 
history  could  have  suggested  —  that  at  the  crisis 
moment  of  poor  Madison's  life  the  great  Napo 
leon  himself  fell  mortally  wounded  from  his 
eagle  flight.  Madison  had  hoped  that  at  least 
he  was  making  himself  an  ally  of  the  greatest 
conqueror  of  the  world.  But  before  his  war  was 
well  begun,  this  great  conqueror  had  lost  the 


PEPPER   AND   GINGER.— WAR!  191 

greatest  army  which  modern  times  had  known, 
and  was  himself  in  flight  from  Moscow  to  his 
own  capital. 

Leaving  the  tragedy  —  and  coming  back  to 
66  History  in  thirteen  lessons  "  —  Madison's  war 
did  not  begin  until  1812. 

The  situation  was  complicated,  of  course,  and 
very  badly  complicated,  by  the  length  of  time 
required  to  receive  news  from  Europe  and  to 
send  instructions  to  Europe.  One  and  another 
excitement  harassed  the  thinking  men  until,  on 
the  18th  of  June,  1812,  Congress  declared  war. 

PEPPER   AND   GINGER.  — WAR! 

A  bright  Portuguese  minister,  whose  name  I 
have  forgotten,  said  in  the  year  1812,  or  there 
abouts,  that  the  same  Providence  which  takes  care 
of  idiots  and  drunkards  takes  care  of  the  United 
States.  I  do  not  suppose  he  thought  that  this 
dictum  would  be  remembered  after  ninety  years, 
nor  do  1  think  that  he  supposed  it  was  a  rever 
ent  statement  of  an  infinite  truth.  All  the  same, 
it  does  state  such  an  infinite  truth.  And  it  is 
one  worth  remembering,  especially  by  people 
whose  business  it  is  to  write  "  leading  articles  " 
between  one  and  two  o'clock  in  the  morning. 


192        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

What  happened  in  1810  has  happened  many, 
many '  times  since ;  and  let  us  hope  reverently 
that  it  will  happen  many,  many  times  more. 
That  is  to  say,  the  "  Power  that  makes  for 
righteousness,"  whose  name  among  most  Eng 
lish-speaking  people  is  God,  helps  forward 
by  his  Immanent  Presence,  and  by  what  we 
call  laws  resulting  from  his  Immanent  Pres 
ence,  all  those  people  who  are  trying  to 
do  his  will.  And  so  it  happened  then  — 
"happened,"  as  we  say  irreverently  —  that  the 
people  of  the  United  States,  so  far  as  they 
were  trying  to  do  right,  were  helped  forward. 
It  "  happened  "  that  there  were  a  few  ignorant 
and  foolish  persons  at  Washington  and  in 
Congress  who  thought  they  knew  better  than 
the  people,  by  and  large,  of  the  United  States. 
These  few  undertook  to  lead  those  many  by 
the  nose.  Here  is  the  Secretary  of  State,  Mr. 
Monroe,  for  instance,  sneering  at  commerce  in 
an  official  conversation  of  1811.  He  says  to 
the  French  Minister  :  — 

"People  in  Europe  suppose  us  to  be  mer 
chants  occupied  exclusively  with  pepper  and 
ginger.  They  are  much  deceived,  and  I  hope 
we  shall  prove  it.  The  immense  majority  of 
our  citizens  do  not  belong  to  this  class,  and  are, 


PEPPER   AND   GINGER.  — WAR!  193 

as  much  as  your  Europeans,  controlled  by  prin 
ciples  of  honor  and  dignity.  I  never  knew  what 
trade  was  ;  the  President  is  as  much  of  a  stranger 
to  it  as  I." 

One  cannot  help  asking  himself,  as  he  reads 
such  words  now,  what  the  New  York  mer 
chants  of  1901  would  say  if  they  found  in  an 
English  Blue  Book  that  Mr.  Hay  was  talking 
in  this  fashion  to  Lord  Pauncefote.  All  the 
same,  it  was  a  fashion  in  which  the  Virginian 
Secretary  of  State  spoke  for  the  Virginian 
President.  It  expressed  what  he  thought  of 
the  commerce  by  which  the  United  States 
"whitened  every  sea,"  and  which  gave  the 
United  States  all  the  power  which  she  had 
in  the  world.  It  was  honest  commerce,  too.  It 
was  the  commerce  of  men  who  had  what  other 
people  wanted  and  were  willing  to  receive  what 
America  produces  in  return.  It  was  such  com 
merce  as  fulfils  the  requisition  of  the  Christian 
law  that  men  must  bear  each  other's  burdens. 

Under  our  Constitution,  Congress,  and  Con 
gress  only,  can  declare  war  against  a  foreign 
power.  In  this  case,  declaration  of  war  had 
lagged  in  Congress  under  the  certainty,  only 
too  evident,  that  there  was  no  disposition  on 
the  part  of  the  people  to  enter  the  new  army. 

VOL.  I.  —  O 


194         MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 


In  the  hope,  which  proved  vain,  that  a  declara 
tion  of  war  would  excite  the  laggard  volunteers, 
war  was  declared  on  the  18th  of  June,  1812. 
This  was  twenty-four  hours  after  Castlereagh, 
in  London,  had  announced  that  the  English 
Government  had  determined  to  suspend  the 
Orders  in  Council.  It  was  about  these  very 
orders  that  all  the  declamation  which  led  to 
the  war  had  gathered.  With  an  ocean  tele 
graph  there  would  have  been  no  war.  "  Within 
forty-eight  hours  Napoleon,  about  to  enter 

Russia,  issued  the  first 
bulletin  of  the  Grand 
Army ;  "  these  are  the 
words  of  Mr.  Adams. 
New  England  had 
looked  with  great  dis 
gust  —  alas  !  I  cannot 
say  contempt — on  the 
whole  war  enterprise. 
After  Jefferson  and  the 
Democratic  party  had 
established  themselves 
as  the  ruling  party 
of  Massachusetts,  all  this  war  business  had  again 
revolutionized  that  State,  and  Caleb  Strong,  the 
Federalist  Governor,  was  well  in  the  saddle.  The 


MAJOR-GENERAL  HENRY 

DEARBORN. 

From  an  original  etching  by 
H.  B.  Hall. 


PEPPER   AND    GINGER.  — WAR!  195 

Commander-in-Chief  of  the  United  States  army 
was  Dearborn,  a  Massachusetts  man ;  the  Secre 
tary  of  War  was  Eustis,  who  was  another.  But 
there  was  no  local  pride  or  interest  in  the  new 
undertaking,  and  the  whole  tone  of  talk  held  it 
in  ridicule,  not  to  say  scorn.  So  it  was  to  the 
great  astonishment,  and  I  may  well  say  satis 
faction,  of  the  Federal  leaders  that  they  found 
themselves  making  capital  for  the  opposition  to 
Madison  from  our  successes  of  the  sea,  as,  indeed, 
Madison  and  his  friends  lost  favor  by  their  suc 
cessive  failures  on  the  land. 

The  policy  of  Jefferson  and  Madison  had  been 
to  reduce  the  navy  and  to  keep  it  at  the  lowest 
point  possible.  It  was  said  on  sufficiently  good 
authority  that  the  commanders  of  our  four 
frigates  took  them  to  sea,  on  the  outbreak 
of  the  war,  as  soon  as  they  could,  because  they 
were  afraid  of  orders  from  Washington  which 
should  keep  them  at  home.  But  Isaac  Hull, 
who  was  in  command  of  the  frigate  Consti 
tution,  was  at  Annapolis,  trying  to  ship  a  new 
crew.  He  had  orders  to  go  to  New  York  in  the 
Constitution,  and  he  sailed  in  this  duty  on  the 
5th  of  July,  1812.  It  was  in  this  voyage  that 
he  fell  in  with  the  English  fleet  of  five  cruisers, 
and  that  the  celebrated  chase  took  place,  of 


196        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

which  men  still  tell  in  the  forecastle.  Hull 
came  into  Boston  Harbor  on  the  26th  of  July, 
after  his  escape.  He  was  afraid  to  come  up 
to  the  navy-yard,  because  Bainbridge  was  there, 
who  was  his  senior,  and  he  had  orders  to  take 


THE  CAPTURE  OF  THE  "GUERRIERE"  BY  THE  ''CONSTITUTION." 
From  an  engraving  by  Samuel  Walker  after  the  drawing  by  T.  Birch. 

command  (5f  the  Constitution  on  her  arrival. 
Hull,  therefore,  stayed  in  the  outer  harbor, 
supplied  himself  with  what  he  needed,  and  in 
less  than  a  week -sailed  again  toward  New 
foundland.  It  was  on  the  19th  of  August  that 
he  met  the  English  frigate  Guerriere. 

The  Guerriere,  under  Dacres,  had   been  well 


PEPPER   AND    GINGER.— WAR! 


197 


WILLIAM  BAINBRIDGE. 
Portrait  by  J.  W  Darvis. 


known  on  the  American  coast  for  many  years 
in  the  offensive  blockade  which  the  arrogance 
of  the  English  Govern 
ment  maintained.  Now 
and  then  Dacres  would 
stop  an  American  mer 
chantman,  summon  her 
crew  on  the  deck,  and 
pick  out  such  English 
sailors  as  his  officers 
found  on  board.  There 
are  legends  which  I 
think  must  have  been 
well  founded,  of  her  coming  into  port  sometimes. 

But  one  can  hardly  be 
lieve  that  Boston,  New 
York,  or  Norfolk  would 
welcome  any  such  visi 
tors.  I  think  there  is 
no  doubt,  however,  that 
her  officers  knew  person 
ally  the  officers  of  the 
Constitution. 
It  is  a  New  England 

COMMODORE  JAMES  RICHARD      tradition,  which  probably 

has     some     foundation, 

Engraved  from  the  portrait  by 

Bowyer.  that  the  Constitution  on 


198        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 


this  cruise  was  manned  with  what  might  be 
called  a  picked  crew.  You  will  hear  it  said 
by  old  men  that  she  had  not  a  man  on  board 
who  could  not  "sail  the  vessel."  This  is  un 
doubtedly  an  exaggeration,  but  I  have  no  doubt 

that  a  large 
number  of  ship 
captains  from 
the  merchant 
marine,  who 
could  not  go  to 
sea  because  of 
the  declaration 
of  war,  had 
shipped  at  An 
napolis,  or  be 
fore,  on  board 
the  frigate.  She 
was  of  larger 

ISAAC  HULL. 
From  an  engraving  after  the  original  portrait    IOrC6     tFian     tne 

by  Gilbert  stuart.  Quemkre,    and 

in  less  than  thirty  minutes  of  the  battle  that  ship 
was  left  without  a  spar  standing.  What  colors  she 
had  she  struck,  and  her  officers  thought  she  was 
sinking.  Hull  took  his  prisoners  on  board  and 
blew  up  the  wreck.  With  his  prisoners  he  arrived 
in  Boston  Sunday  morning,  the  30th  of  August. 


PEPPER   AND   GINGER.  — WAR! 


199 


The  whole  thing  was  dramatic  in  every  detail. 

Rodgers    and    Decatur,    with    their    squadron, 

entered  Boston  within 
forty-eight  hours  empty- 
handed,  "  after  more  than 
two  months  of  futile 
cruising."  The  news 
paper  which  announced 
their  arrival  announced 
also  the  melancholy  in 
telligence  of  the  sur 
render  of  General  Hull 
at  Detroit.  General  Hull 
was  a  veteran  of  the 
Revolution,  and  was  an 

uncle  of  the  Isaac  Hull  who  was  the  hero  of 

the  day.      There  was  as 

yet    no    daily  paper   in 

Boston.     The  news  was 

made    known    by    real 

"  Extras." 

My    father    used    to 

tell   with  gusto   of   the 

triumphant     discussions 

in  the  newspaper  office 

as    to    their    announce 
ment  of  the  victory  and 


COMMODORE  RODGERS. 
Portrait  by  Henry  Williams. 


STEPHEN  DECATUR. 
Portrait  by  Gilbert  Stuart. 


200        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

the  defeat.  In  the  seaboard,  which  was  crazy 
with  excitement  because  of  the  sinking  of  the 
English  frigate,  it  was  easy  to  remind  men 
that  the  Constitution  had  been  built  at  their 
wharves,  that  she  was  manned  by  their  seamen, 
that  it  was  John  Adams's  foresight  that  had 
built  her,  and  that  the  true  policy  of  the  Nation 
would  have  been  the  maintenance  of  a  large  fleet 
of  such  vessels.  At  the  same  moment  it  was 
easy  to  point  out  the  folly  of  the  administra 
tion  which  had  pretended  to  invade  Canada  in 
the  face  of  an  active  enemy,  who  had  taken 
advantage  of  our  want  of  preparation  to  take 
the  aggressive  with  success.  Here  are  some  of 
the  stories  of  the  time  which  came  to  me,  after 
a  generation,  with  excellent  authority.  I  print 
them  for  what  they  are  worth  because  they  are 
~ben  trovato.  These  anecdotes  of  Hull  and  Dacres 
I  copy  from  a  note-book  of  iny  own  of  1894 :  — 

"  At  the  Authors'  Guild  dinner  at  Salem  to 
day  the  President  told  three  stories  of  Hull  and 
Dacres. 

"  1.  He  says  that  before  the  war  the  Guerriere 
was  on  our  coast  and  that  Hull  entertained  her 
officers  at  dinner  on  his  ship  (probably  at  the 
Charlestown  navy-yard).  They  fell  to  talk  of 
what  they  would  do  if  there  were  war,  and  Hull 


THE  CONSTITUTION 


I  OFTEN  have  been  told 

That  the  British  seamen  bold 

Could  beat  the  tars  of  France  neat  and  handy  0 ; 

But  they  never  found  their  match, 

Till  the  Yankees  did  them  catch, 

For  the  Yankee  tars  for  fighting  are  the  dandy  O. 

0  the  Guerriere  so  bold 

On  the  foaming  ocean  rolled, 

Commanded  by  Dacres  the  grandee  0, 

For  the  choice  of  British  crew 

That  a  rammer  ever  drew 

Could  beat  the  Frenchmen  two  to  one  quite  bandy  O. 

When  the  frigate  hove  in  view, 

0  said  Dacres  to  his  crew, 

Prepare  ye  for  action  and  be  handy  O, 

On  the  weather-guage  we  '11  get  her; 

And  to  make  his  men  fight  better, 

He  gave  to  them  gunpowder  and  good  brandy  0. 

Now  this  boasting  Briton  cries, 
Make  that  Yankee  ship  your  prize, 
You  can  in  thirty  minutes  do  it  handy  0, 
Or  twenty-five,  I  'm  sure 
You  '11  do  it  in  a  score, 

1  will  give  you  a  double  share  of  good  brandy  0. 

When  prisoners  we  've  made  them, 
With  switchell  we  w  ill  treat  them, 
We  will  treat  them  with  Yankee  doodle  dandy  O; 


The  British  balls  flew  hot, 

But  the  Yankees  answered  not, 

Until  they  got  a  distance  that  was  handy  0 

O  cried  Hull  unto  his  crew, 

We  '11  try  what  we  can  do  ; 

If  we  beat  those  boasting  Britons  we're  the  dandy  0. 

The  first  broadside  we  poured 

Brought  the  mizzen  by  the  board,      . 

Which  doused  the  royal  ensign  quite  handy  a 

0  Dacres  he  did  sigh, 
And  to  his  officers  did  cry, 

1  did  not  think  these  Yankees  were  so  handy  0. 
The  second  told  so  well 

That  the  fore  and  mainmast  fell, 

Which  made  this  lofty  frigate  look  quite  handy  0. 

O  says  Dacres,  we  're  undone, 

So  he  fires  a  lee  gun, 

Our  drummer  struck  up  Yankee  doodle  dandy  0 ; 

When  Dacres  came  on  board 

To  deliver  up  his  sword, 

He  was  loth  to  part  with  it,  it  looked  so  handy  0. 

You  may  keep  it,  says  brave  Hull, 

What  makes  you  look  so  dull; 

Cheer  up  and  take  a  glass  of  .good  brandy  0 ; 

0  Britons,  now  be  still, 

Since  we  've  hooked  you  in  the  gill, 

Don't  boast  upon  Dacres  the  grandee  0. 


A  BROADSIDE  OF  1812. 
From  an  original  in  the  possession  of  the  author. 


PEPPER   AND   GINGER.  — WAR!  203 

said  that  he  would  bring  them  all  into  some 
American  port.  Dacres  offered  to  bet  one  hun 
dred  guineas.  Hull  said  no,  but  he  would  bet  a 
hat. 

"  When  the  Guerriere  was  taken,  and  Dacres 
gave  up  his  sword  on  the  quarter-deck,  Hull 
returned  it  to  him,  but  said,  '  But  I  will  thank 
you  for  the  hat.' 

"  2.  After  the  war  Hull  and  his  wife  were  at 
Gibraltar,  and  Admiral  Dacres  received  them  with 
great  courtesy.  On  his  own  ship  he  showed  Mrs. 
Hull  his  own  Bible  which  his  mother  had  given 
him.  He  said  that  when  the  Guerriere  was 
burned,  Hull  asked  him  what  he  wanted  him  to 
send  for  specially,  and  Dacres  asked  that  the 
Bible  in  his  cabin  might  be  saved.  It  was  sent 
for,  and  this  was  the  book. 

"  Hull  and  Dacres  were  in  Rome  together, 
and  the  boys  in  the  street  used  to  call  them 
light  and  shadow,  Hull  being  short  and  stocky 
and  Dacres  tall  and  thin." 

"  Mr.  James  Hale,  writing  in  1880,  says :  '  I 
remember  seeing  Commodore  Hull  march  up 
State  Street  with  Captain  Dacres  having  his 
arm,  after  the  capture  of  the  Guerriere  by  the 
Constitution.  And,  in  company  with  many 
others,  saw,  from  one  of  the  islands  in  the 


204        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

harbor,  the  fight  between  the  Chesapeake  and 
Shannon.  Two  days  before  I  saw  poor  Lawrence 
in  State  Street." 

Some  of  such  anecdotes,  perhaps  all,  must  be 
true.  There  was  more  than  one  ballad  printed 
and  sung.  One  which  is  said  to  have  been  writ 
ten  by  James  Campbell,  a  sailor  on  the  Constitu 
tion,  begins  with  the  words  :  — 

"  Come  all  ye  Yankee  heroes,  come  listen  to  my  song, 
I'll  tell  you  of  a  bloody  fight  before  that  it  be  long, 
It  was  of  the  Constitution,  from  Boston  she  set  sail, 
To  cruise  along  the  coast,  my  boys,  our  rights  for  to 
maintain. 

"  So  come  rouze  ye,  Yankee  tars,  let  it  never  be  said, 
That  the  sons  of  America  should  ever  be  afraid." 

But  the  song  which  has  lingered  in  memory,  and 
is  to  this  hour  sung  among  seamen,  is  the  ballad 
which  we  show  in  facsimile  on  another  page. 

A  great  public  dinner  was  given  to  Isaac  Hull 
by  the  town  of  Boston,  and  he  was  asked  to  sit  for 
his  picture  to  Gilbert  Stuart,  the  celebrated  artist. 
The  portrait  is  in  Faneuil  Hall  to  this  day.1 
Everybody  is  dead  now,  so  that  I  will  make 

1  Or  affects  to  be.  The  real  Stuarts  were  removed  from 
Faneuil  Hall  a  few  years  ago,  to  escape  the  danger  of  fire,  and 
may  now  be  seen  in  the  Museum  of  Fine  Arts.  The  copies 
in  their  places  are  so  good  that  no  visitor  need  regret  the 
change. 


PEPPER   AND   GINGER.  — WAR!  205 

bold  to  tell  one  of  the  anecdotes  of  the  picture. 
Stuart  was  himself  a  great  braggart,  and  he  was 
entertaining  Hull  with  anecdotes  of  his  English 
success,  stories  of  the  Marquis  of  this  and  the 
Baroness  of  that,  which  showed  how  elegant 
was  the  society  to  which  he  had  been  accus 
tomed  in  England.  Unfortunately,  in  the  midst 
of  this  grandeur,  Mrs.  Stuart,  who  did  not  know 
that  there  was  a  sitter,  came  in  with  her  apron 
on  and  her  head  tied  up  with  some  handkerchief, 
from  the  kitchen,  and  cried  out,  "  Did  you  mean 
to  have  that  leg  of  mutton  boiled  or  roasted  ?  " 
To  which  Stuart  replied,  with  presence  of  mind 
to  be  recommended  to  all  husbands,  "  Ask  your 
mistress." 

It  was  at  the  beginning  of  June,  in  1813, 
the  next  year,  that  the  exultation  which  had 
welcomed  Hull  and  the  Constitution  received  a 
heavy  check  in  the  battle  fought  off  Boston 
Harbor,  in  which  the  ill-fated  and  unlucky 
Chesapeake  surrendered  to  the  English  ship 
Shannon.  Old  people  still  tell  you  how  on  that 
Tuesday,  the  first  day  of  June,  men  and  women 
went  to  the  high  lookouts  and  hill-tops  of  Boston 
that  they  might  see  the  Chesapeake  bring  in  the 
Shannon  for  a  prize.  Our  ship  had  been  lying 
in  "  President's  Roads,"  in  plain  sight  of  the 


206        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 


wharves  of  Boston.  According  to  Mr.  Henry 
Adams's  interesting  and  intelligible  account,  the 
Chesapeake  could  have  fired  only  fifty-two  shot. 
"  She  had  been  a  beaten  ship  from  the  moment 
when  she  was  taken  aback  after  the  loss  of  her 
forward  sails."  She  was  really  captured  by 

boarding  in  a  tragical 
fight,  in  which,  on  her 
crowded  deck,  her  crew 
had  no  officers,  and  in 
which  all  the  English 
officers  were  killed  or 
wounded.  Of  the  fifty 
Englishmen  who  passed 
to  the  deck  of  the  Chesa 
peake  from  the  deck  of 
the  Shannon,  no  less  than 
thirty-seven  were  killed 
or  wounded.  Mr.  Adams  supposes  that  Law 
rence,  the  commander  of  the  Chesapeake.,  who 
was  himself  killed,  had  been  satisfied  of  his 
"  easy  superiority  in  the  battle  "  by  his  successes 
in  the  Hornet. 

From  an  interesting  letter  from  Mr.  Buck  I 
am  able  to  copy  a  passage  which  shows  the 
impression  made  at  the  time  on  a  competent 
observer  who  saw  the  crews  of  both  the  frigates. 


JAMES  LAWRENCE. 
Portrait  by  Gilbert  Stuart. 


PEPPER  AND   GINGER.  — WAR!  207 

"From  Captain  Butler  I  learned  that  his 
vessel  had  been  captured  by  the  Shannon  in 
1813.  He  was  kept  with  the  vessel  a  few  days 
and  then  requested  to  bear  a  challenge  from  the 
commander  of  the  British  ship  to  Commander 
Lawrence  of  the  Chesapeake,  then  lying  in  Bos 
ton  Harbor.  He  was  promised  his  freedom, 
with  that  of  all  belonging  to  his  vessel,  on  con 
dition  of  bearing  said  challenge.  The  offer  was 
readily  accepted.  While  a  captive  he  had  been 
a  careful  observer.  The  crew  of  the  Shannon 
appeared  to  him  to  be  a  picked  crew,  very 
thoroughly  drilled.  As  he  took  the  challenge 
to  Lawrence  the  crew  of  the  Chesapeake  seemed 
to  him  in  a  demoralized  condition.  They  had 
been  in  port  just  long  enough,  with  perhaps 
special  license  to  become  thus.  He  felt  quite 
sure  what  the  results  would  be  if  the  challenge 
was  accepted.  The  results  were  as  he  expected." 

Lawrence  died  before  the  ships  reached  Halifax, 
and  his  first  lieutenant  also  died.  Lawrence's  dy 
ing  words,  "  Don't  give  up  the  ship,"  have  become 
a  proverb  in  the  Nation. 

To  those  of  us  who  grew  up  in  Boston,  a 
queer  reminiscence  of  this  defeat  turned  up  more 
than  a  generation  after,  when  Tom  Hughes' s 
"School  Life  in  Rugby"  was  printed.  For  it 


208        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

was  interesting  to  know  that,  while  American 
boys  were  singing,  "  Bold  Dacres  came  on  board 
to  deliver  up  his  sword,"  English  schoolboys 
were  singing  about  the  Chesapeake  and  Shannon. 
It  seems  that  Tom  Hughes  was  at  Rugby  with  a 
boy  named  Brooke,  who  was  or  was  not  a  nephew 
of  the  captain  of  the  Shannon.  Here  is  Tom 
Brown's  amusing  account  of  the  credit  given  to 
the  English  ballad  by  boys  in  the  different  forms 
at  Rugby :  — 

"  Then  followed  other  vociferous  songs  in 
rapid  succession,  including  the  Chesapeake  and 
Shannon,  a  song  lately  introduced  in  honor  of 
old  Brooke ;  and  when  they  come  to  the  words, 

" '  Brave  Broke  lie  waved  his  sword,  crying,  Now,  my  lads, 

aboard, 
And  we'll  stop  their  playing  Yankee-doodle-dandy  oh ! ' 

you  expect  the  roof  to  come  down.  The  sixth 
and  fifth  know  that  6  brave  Broke '  of  the  Shan 
non  was  no  sort  of  relation  to  our  old  Brooke. 
The  fourth  form  are  uncertain  in  their  belief, 
but  for  the  most  part  hold  that  old  Brooke  was 
a  midshipman  then  on  board  his  uncle's  ship. 
And  the  lower  school  never  doubt  for  a  moment 
that  it  was  our  old  Brooke  who  led  the  boarders, 
in  what  capacity  they  care  not  a  straw." 


PEPPER   AND   GINGER.— WAR!  209 

Here  is  the  whole  ballad.1  It  is  evidently 
written  by  some  one  who  had  seen  the  Constitu 
tion  and  Guerriere  ballad :  — 

"  The  Chesapeake  so  bold 
Out  of  Boston,  I've  been  told, 
Came  to  take  a  British  Frigate 

Neat  and  handy  0  ! 
While  the  people  of  the  port 
Flocked  out  to  see  the  sport, 
With  their  music  playing 

Yankee  Doodle  Dandy  0  ! 

"Now  the  British  Frigate's  name 
Which  for  the  purpose  came 
Of  cooling  Yankee  courage 

Neat  and  handy,  0  ! 
Was  the  Shannon  Captain  Broke, 
Whose  crew  were  heart  of  oak, 
And  for  fighting  were  confessed 

To  be  the  dandy,  0  ! 

"  The  engagement  scarce  begun 
Ere  they  flinched  from  their  guns, 
Which  at  first  they  thought  of  working 

Neat  and  handy,  0 ! 
The  bold  Broke  he  waved  his  sword, 
Crying,  '  Now,  my  lads,  on  board, 
And  we'll  stop  their  playing 
Yankee  Doodle  Dandy,  0  ! ' 


1  Mr.  Whitney  enables  me  to  reprint  this  ballad. 
VOL.  i.  —  P 


210        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

"  They  no  sooner  heard  the  word 
Than  they  quickly  rushed  aboard 
And  hauled  down  the  Yankee  ensign 

Neat  and  handy,  0  ! 
Notwithstanding  all  their  brag, 
Now  the  glorious  British  flag 
At  the  Yankee's  mizzen-peak 

Was  quite  the  dandy,  O ! 

"  Successful  Broke  to  you, 
And  your  officers  and  crew, 
Who  on  board  the  Shannon  frigate 

Fought  so  handy,  0  ! 
And  may  it  ever  prove 
That  in  fighting  as  in  love 

The  true  British  tar  is  the  dandy,  0 !  " 

Here   are   the   kindred  verses   from   another 
Chesapeake  and  Shannon  song :  — 

"  Silent  as  death  the  foe  drew  nigh, 

While  lock'd  in  hostile  close  embrace, 
Brave  Broke,  with  British  seaman's  eye, 

The  signs  of  terror  soon  could  trace. 
He  exclaim 'd  while  his  looks  did  his  ardor  bespeak, 

Brave  boys  they  all  flinch  from  their  Cannon ! 
Board,  board,  my  brave  messmates,  the  proud  Chesa 
peake, 
Shall  soon  be  a  prize  to  the  Shannon. 

"  Swiftly  flow  the  words ;  Britannia's  sons 

Spread  death  and  terror  where'er  they  came, 
The  trembling  foe  forsook  their  guns, 
And  call'd  aloud  in  mercy's  name. 


PEPPER   AND   GINGER,  — WAR!  211 

Brave  Broke  led  the  way,  but  fell  wounded  and  weak, 
Yet  exclaim'd  —  They  have  fled  from  their  Cannon  ! 

Three  cheers,  my  brave  seamen,  the  proud  Chesapeake, 
Has  lowered  a  flag  to  the  Shannon ! 

"  The  day  was  won,  but  Lawrence  fell, 

He  closed  his  eyes  in  endless  night, 
And  oft  Columbia's  sons  will  tell 

Of  hopes  all  blighted  in  that  fight. 
But  brave  Captain  Broke,  though  wounded  and  weak, 

He  survives  to  again  ply  his  cannon, 
And  his  name  from  the  shores  of  the  wide  Chesapeake, 

Shall  resound  to  the  banks  of  the  Shannon." 

Chesapeake  has  been  such  a  wretched  name  in 
our  naval  annals  that  I  have  been  surprised  that 
our  naval  people  care  or  dare  to  retain  it.  The 
grand  people  may  think  there  is  no  such  thing 
as  luck,  but  sailors  think  there  is.  If  I  had  my 
way,  we  should  preserve  more  of  the  historical 
naval  names,  like  Ranger,  Protector.,  Tyranni 
cide,  Bon  Homme  Richard,  and  Serapis.  You 
could  say  "  Poor  Richard,"  if  you  wanted  to  put 
it  in  English. 

The  account  of  Broke's  victory  given  in  the 
Georgian  Era  is  in  these  words :  "  Toward 
the  close  of  the  battle,  Broke  leaped  on  board 
the  enemy's  ship,  and  having  saved  the  life  of 
an  American  seaman,  who  called  for  quarter,  re 
ceived  the  stroke  of  a  cutlass  on  the  back  of  the 


212        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 


head  from  the  wretch  whom  he  had  spared. 
This  wound  had  nearly  proved  fatal,  and  from 
its  effects  he  never  afterward  recovered.  His 
assailant  was  immediately  cut  in  pieces  by  the 
sailors  on  the  Shannon,  and  the  Chesapeake  be 
came  a  prize  to  the  English.  The  action,  which 

only  occupied  fifteen  min 
utes,  was  one  of  the  most 
bloody  and  determined 
ever  fought  between  two 
ships  of  their  class  in  so 
short  a  time." 

For  this  achievement 
Broke  received  a  gold 
medal,  as  well  as  the 
formal  thanks  of  the  lords 
of  the  admiralty,  besides 
a  sword  of  the  value 
of  one  hundred  guineas. 
The  people  of  Suffolk  subscribed  more  than 
seven  hundred  pounds  for  a  piece  of  plate,  and 
an  Ipswich  Club  gave  him  a  cup  of  the  value  of 
one  hundred  guineas.  On  the  2d  of  November 
he  was  made  a  baronet.  The  Shannon  was  con 
demned  unfit  for  further  service.  Broke' s  name 
was  Philip  Bowes  Vere  Broke. 

It  is  said  that  the  Chesapeake  never  went  to 


CAPTAIN  SIB  P.  V.  BROKE. 

From  an  engraving  by 

W.  Greatbatch. 


PEPPER  AND   GINGER.  — WAR!  213 

sea  under  an  English  commander;  that  no  man 
liked  to  walk  the  deck  which  had  been  stained 
by  his  companions'  blood.  The  English  Govern 
ment  maintained  the  name  Shannon  until  two 
or  three  years  ago,  when  the  armored  cruiser 
Shannon  was  lost.  In  our  War  of  the  Rebellion 
there  was  a  Southern  cruiser  named  the 
Chesapeake. 

Mr.  James  E.  Whitney,  Jr.,  is  kind  enough  to 
send  me  the  following  note  which  gives  the  his 
tory  of  the  poor  Chesapeake :  — 

"The  Chesapeake  was  sold  in  1820  to  Mr. 
Holmes  of  Portsmouth,  England,  who  broke  her 
up  and  sold  the  timbers  which  were  of  pitch  pine, 
quite  new  and  sound,  for  building  purposes. 
Much  was  used  in  houses  built  in  Portsmouth, 
but  a  larger  part  was  bought  by  John  Pierce,  a 
miller  of  Wickham  in  Hampshire,  who  used  it  in 
constructing  a  new  mill.  The  deck  timbers  were 
thirty-two  feet  long  and  eighteen  inches  square, 
and  were  placed,  unaltered,  horizontally,  in  the 
mill.  The  purlins  of  the  deck  were  about  twelve 
feet  long,  and  served  without  alteration  for  joists. 
In  1864  the  mill  —  a  flour  mill  —  was  owned  by 
a  man  named  Goderick.  Wickham  is  nine  miles 
from  Portsmouth." 

Old-fashioned  people  will  remember  how  angry 


214         MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

our  fathers  were  because  the  English  newspapers 
spoke  of  the  Constitution  and  our  other  frigates 
as  "  pine  built  frigates."  This  gives  interest  to 
the  statement  that  some  of  the  Chesapeake  tim 
bers  were  of  pine.  It  seems  to  me  that  an  old 
joke  applies  here,  that  it  made  no  difference 
what  Jove's  thunderbolts  were  made  of  if  they 
proved  to  be  thunderbolts. 

Some  recent  inquiry  satisfies  me  that  no 
American  officer  surrendered  the  Chesapeake 
in  form.  The  ballad  is  quite  correct  which  says 
of  the  boarders,  "  They  hauled  down  the  Yankee 
ensign." 


JAMES   MONROE 


CHAPTER  V 
JAMES   MONROE 

WHEN  Dean  Stanley  visited  America  a  few 
years  before  his  death,  one  of  the  queer, 
pregnant  questions  which  he  put  to  a  gentleman 
who  was  welcoming  him  was,  "  What  was  the 
end  of  the  Federal  party  ?  " 

"  As  if  I  knew  what  was  the  end  of  the  Fed 
eral  party ! "  said  his  host  to  me,  afterward, 
when  he  was  describing  the  interview.  And 
that  ejaculation  is  a  fair  enough  illustration  of 
the  curious  difficulty  which  haunts  almost  all 
the  political  writers  and  historians.  As  I  have 
said  twenty  times  in  these  papers,  people  who 
are  trained  to  read  histories  and  to  write  them 
cannot  rid  themselves  of  the  old  superstitions 
which  imply  that  the  State  of  New  York  to-day 
is  governed  by  Albany,  that  the  State  of  Ohio  is 
governed  by  the  city  of  Columbus,  or  that  the 
United  States  is  governed  from  Washington. 

I  ought  not  to  say  all  people  on  the  Continent 
of  Europe.  For  Mr.  James  Bryce,  who  does 

217 


218        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

understand  these  things,  says  somewhere  that 
when  he  wrote  there  was  a  schoolmaster  in 
Switzerland  who  understood  the  relation  of  our 
State  Government  with  the  National  Govern- 


JAMES  MONROE. 
From  the  portrait  by  Vanderlyn. 

ment.     But  I  never  met  this  gentleman  nor  his 
writing. 

It  is  vastly  easier  to  follow  along  eight  years 
of  Washington  life  in  James  Monroe's  adminis 
tration,  and  to  call  that  the  "history  of 
America,"  than  it  is  to  read  and  to  write  the 


JAMES   MONROE  219 

endless  narrative  of  what  really  happened  in 
America  between  1817  and  1825.  The  truth  is, 
as  I  try  to  say  in  every  chapter,  if  anybody  could 
be  made  to  believe  it,  that  the  people  of  America 
govern  America.  The  various  administrations 
run  by  the  side  of  the  chariot,  they  make  a  good 
deal  of  dust  as  they  run,  and  the  equerries  and 
the  escort  sometimes  think  that  they  are  the 
riders.  All  people  on  the  Continent  of  Europe 
think  that  such  persons  are  the  rulers,  while  in 
truth  the  people  in  a  thousand  organizations, 
or  without  any  organization,  are  carrying  the 
country  forward  in  their  own  way.  Yet  you  may 
read  many  a  "  History  of  America  "  written  in 
America  which  does  not  say  one  word  of  the 
affairs  of  any  State,  of  forty-five  "  Sovereign 
States." 

The  dynasty  of  Mr.  Madison  was  broken  in 
upon  by  the  war  with  England.  The  war  was 
none  of  his  making,  it  was  no  part  of  his  plan, 
but  he  could  not  help  himself  and  it  came. 
Fortunately  for  him  and  fortunately  for  the 
country,  it  was  a  short  war.  It  was  a  war  in 
which  the  people,  shut  up  at  home  as  they  would 
have  been  had  the  Atlantic  Ocean  been  an  ocean 
of  fire,  were  developing  natural  resources  which 
are  so  enormous  that  to  this  day  we  are  only 


220        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

scratching  at  the  surface  of  our  treasure.  With 
the  peace  the  Federal  party  died  by  a  natural 
death.  It  had  nothing  to  do.  It  was  pledged 
to  a  strong  central  government.  And  now  Jef 
ferson  and  Madison  had  assumed  powers  which 
the  old  Federalist  leaders  had  never  dared  to  ask 
for.  It  had  opposed  the  war  with  England,  and 
peace  with  England  had  come.  No  man  in 
America  was  fool  enough  to  take  up  the  broken 
fortunes  of  poor  Napoleon,  before  whom  every 
body  in  the  administration  had  been  kneeling 
only  two  years  before.  And  the  Federalist 
leaders  were  paying  as  they  deserved  for  any 
distrust  they  had  ever  felt  of  the  People.  The 
People  was  taking  care  of  itself  and  was 
directing  its  own  future  quite  unmindful  of 
the  intrigues  or  blunders  or  the  successes  at 
Washington. 

Who  should  be  the  President  to  follow  poor 
Mr.  Madison  ?  Why,  Mr.  Monroe  was  Secretary 
of  State :  let  him  be  President.  It  is  clear 
enough  that  nobody  cared  much.  Certainly  no 
body  was  afraid  of  undue  abilities  in  a  man  who 
had  never  shown  any  ability  so  far.  And  it  is 
fair  to  say  that  James  Monroe  drifted  into  the 
Presidency,  drifted  through  office,  and  drifted 
out  of  the  Presidency,  while  his  great  master, 


JAMES   MONROE  221 

the  American  People,  was  carrying  forward 
its  own  enterprises  and  doing  its  own  busi 
ness. 

One  remembers,  of  course,  whose  name  is 
given  to  the  Monroe  Doctrine.  One  remembers 
that  in  his  dynasty  we  purchased  Florida.  In  a 
separate  chapter  I  will  try  to  trace  some  of  the 
more  curious  lines  of  the  development  of  emigra 
tion  to  the  West,  about  which  even  then  the 
self-styled  leaders  seem  to  have  been  curiously 
doubtful.  The  President,  as  soon  as  he  was 
President,  the  same  man  who  "  never  was  in 
trade  and  knew  nothing  about  it,"  arrayed  him 
self  to  see  the  commercial  States,  and  even  to 
cross  to  the  new-born  West  and  show  himself  to 
the  people  who  were  creating  a  nation  there. 
In  my  boyhood,  this  journey  of  his,  which  began 
on  the  31st  day  of  May,  1817,  and  did  not  end 
until  October  of  the  same  year,  was  called  "The 
President's  Progress."  Washington's  similar 
journey  in  1791  was  always  called  "Washing 
ton's  Progress."  There  is  a  little  touch  of  bur 
lesque  when  one  reads  that  President  Monroe 
arrayed  himself  in  the  old  buff  and  blue  of  the 
Revolution  with  an  old-fashioned  three-cornered 
soldier's  hat.  There  is  just  a  touch  of  absurdity 
about  this,  because  his  military  exploits  were,  of 


222        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

his  whole  life,  the  enterprises  which  his  friends 
would  have  most  gladly  forgotten.1 

There  is  a  good  Harvard  tradition  which  I 
may  put  in  print  without  hurting  anybody.  At 
a  meeting  of  the  little  college  faculty  in  the  year 
1817,  it  was  announced  that  Blank,  a  spirited 
senior,  must  be  "suspended."  I  suppose  his 
marks  were  not  high  enough,  or  his  attendance 
at  chapel  had  been  irregular.  Dear,  courteous, 
kindly  Dr.  Kirkland,  who  was  the  President,  was 
supposed  to  be  dozing  in  his  chair  as  the  march 
of  college  government  went  forward  ;  but  at  this 
proposal  to  suspend  Blank  he  roused  to  life  and 
activity.  "  Send  away  Blank,  when  Mr.  Monroe 
is  coming?  Who  will  command  my  Harvard 


1  Burr  hated  Monroe  from  the  time  when  he  served  with  him 
in  the  Revolution.  Burr  says  of  his  military  career,  in  a  letter 
of  1815,  that  Monroe  "  never  commanded  a  platoon  nor  was 
ever  fit  to  command  one.  He  served  in  the  Revolutionary  war, 
that  is,  he  acted  a  short  time  as  aide  de  camp  to  Lord  Sterling 
who  was  regularly 

*•*  *  *  *  *  *  * 

Monroe's  whole  duty  was  to  fill  his  Lordship's  tankard,  and  to 
hear  with  indications  of  admiration  his  Lordship's  long  stories 
about  himself.  Such  is  Monroe's  military  experience.  I  was 
with  my  regiment  in  the  same  division  at  the  time.  As  a 
lawyer,  Monroe  was  far  below  mediocrity.  He  never  rose  to 
the  honour  of  trying  a  cause  of  the  value  of  one  hundred 
pounds." 

"  This  is  a  character  exactly  suited  to  the  views  of  the 
Virginia  junto." 


JAMES   MONROE  223 

Washington  Corps  when  the  President  visits  the 
College  ? "  The  Harvard  Washington  Corps 
was  the  military  establishment  of  the  college 
boys  at  that  time.  Dr.  Kirkland  could  put  his 
foot  down  when  he  chose.  And  so  it  chanced 
that  Blank  was  retained  in  college  and  that  the 
Harvard  Washington  Corps,  which  he  com 
manded,  presented  arms  at  the  proper  time  and 
in  the  proper  way  to  the  President  of  the  United 
States.  And  so  it  happened  that,  fifty  years 
after,  Harvard  University  received  a  very  im 
portant  and  very  expensive  new  building  from 
an  alumnus  who  on  that  day  commanded  the 
Harvard  Washington  Corps. 

If  I  could  get  history  written  as  I  should  like 
to  have  it  written,  there  would  be  a  nice  bronze 
put  up  in  the  doorway  of  that  spacious  hall, 
which  would  tell  this  story  for  the  next  hundred 
years.  I  observe  that  men  spell  the  name  with 
one  more  letter  than  they  used  in  1817. 

There  is  yet  in  the  ink-bottle  a  good  historical 
essay,  not  yet  written,  on  students  who  have 
been  exiled  from  college  and  those  who  have  not. 
Fenimore  Cooper,  for  instance,  is  not  in  the 
catalogue  of  Yale  University,  although  he  was 
a  student  there. 


224         MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED    YEARS 

THE  ERA  OF  GOOD  FEELING1 

This  is  the  old-fashioned  phrase,  now  gener 
ally  forgotten,  which  was  introduced  by  some 
bright  person  in  Monroe's  time. 

The  real  English  of  the  matter,  as  I  under 
stand  it,  is  that  the  principle  of  "  two  terms  " 
had  been  well  introduced,  and  was  considered  as 
rather  a  matter  of  course.  The  Virginians  were 
in  the  saddle ;  they  had  been  in  the  saddle  since 
the  beginning ;  they  had  not  much  else  to  do 
than  to  administer  the  general  government ;  and, 
which  is  the  most  important  point  of  all,  there 
was  not  much  general  government  to  administer. 
There  is  a  certain  humor  in  what  Burr  said  of 
the  Virginia  junto  in  1815 :  "To  this  junto  you 
have  twice  sacrificed  yourself  and  what  have  you 
got  by  it  ?  Their  hatred  and  abhorrence.  Did 
you  ever  know  them  to  countenance  a  man  of 
talents  and  independence  ?  Never  nor  ever  will ! " 

That  is  to  say  that  the  Nation  as  a  Nation 
was  still  hardly  conscious  of  its  own  existence. 
The  States'  Rights  doctrine  was  still  the  favorite 
doctrine  of  a  great  many  theorists,  who  believed, 
as  most  people  do  believe,  that  all  the  world  of 
any  importance  is  within  ten  miles  of  their  own 

1  Ascribed  to  Ben.  Russell  or  his  wife  in  Appleton,  —  at  the 
time  of  Monroe's  progress.  See  p.  228. 


THE   ERA   OF   GOOD   FEELING  225 

meeting-house.  And  this  theory  of  government 
lingered  among  the  men  who  cared  for  govern 
ment.  But  they  were  not  many  in  proportion. 
The  country  was  advancing,  with  the  energy 
and  dignity  which  I  have  tried  to  describe,  on 
its  own  business.  The  New  Englanders  were 
weaving  cotton  and  woollen  by  the  power  of  their 
own  waterfalls.  Nobody  seems  to  understand 
it  to  this  day,  but  men  really  do  like  better  to 
have  the  rain  from  heaven  drive  their  looms  and 
wheels  than  to  have  their  wives  work  a  treadle 
or  make  a  wheel  go  round  by  a  crank.  The 
Virginians  were  selling  their  slaves  to  the  South 
west  at  a  very  high  price,  and  the  people  of  the 
South  and  West  were  selling  their  cotton  and 
wool  at  very  high  prices.  People  were  begin 
ning  to  find  out  that  there  was  a  West,  and 
such  men  as  De  Witt  Clinton  and  others  were 
insisting  upon  it  that  there  should  be  highways 
to  the  West.  What  was  there  for  the  "  General 
Government "  to  do  ?  It  could  fuss  and  fiddle 
about  treaties  which  should  permit  our  bread- 
stuffs  to  go  into  the  West  India  Islands.  It 
could  fuss  and  fiddle  about  some  claims  we  had 
on  the  Governments  of  France  and  Spain  for 
some  ships  which  had  been  destroyed  some 
years  before ;  but  really  there  was  very  little 

VOL.  I.  — Q 


226        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 


\ 


National  business,  as  we  understand  National 
business  to-day.  People  suffered  from  a  bad 
currency ;  but  they  did  not  understand  what 
advantage  they  would  gain  from  a  currency  like 
ours  to-day,  in  which  a  bill  on  an  Arkansas  bank 
is  as  good  as  a  bill  issued  in  the  city  of  New 

York.  Indeed, 
for  one  reason 
or  another,  the 
Nation  did  not 
assert  itself 
much  in  the 
management  of 
the  currency. 

|^  ^^^        The   Pe°Ple  at 

Washington 

could  not  make 
up  their  minds 
whether  they 
did  or  did  not  want  to  help  in  the  business  of 
highways  across  the  Alleghany  Mountains. 

There  came  about  some  rather  curious  illustra 
tions  of  this  comparative  insignificance  of  the 
National  Government,  which  are  perhaps  worth 
jotting  down.  When  the  yellow  fever  broke 
out  in  Philadelphia,  as  early  as  1797,  all  the 
officers  of  Government  retired  from  that  city. 


GOVERNOR  DE  WITT  CLINTON. 
Engraved  from  the  bust  by  A.  B.  Durand. 


THE   ERA   OF   GOOD   FEELING  227 

John  Adams  lived  in  Braintree,  Mass.,1  for  much 
of  that  time,  and  had  his  mail  brought  to  him 
once  or  twice  a  week  from  Philadelphia  ;  and 
there  are  queer  letters  in  the  foreign  correspond 
ence  which  say,  almost  in  so  many  words,  that 
the  business  of  the  Government  is  suspended 
until  the  yellow  fever  shall  be  cured. 

It  is  rather  interesting  to  say  that  Adams 
himself  said  when  it  began,  "  I  have  no  appre 
hension  of  danger."  But  he  added,  "  the  mem 
bers  of  Congress  will  be  more  exposed  than  I 
shall  be,  and  I  hold  myself  intrusted  with  the 
care  of  their  health  —  a  precious  deposit  which 
I  will  preserve  according  to  the  best  of  my 
judgement  with  perfect  integrity  and  with  more 
caution  than  I  would  take  for  my  own."  This 
is  in  a  letter  to  Wolcott  of  October,  1797. 

Mr.  Henry  Adams  cites  Joseph  Hopkinson  to 
say,  in  1814,  "The  general  Government  would 
have  dissolved  into  its  original  elements,  its  pow 
ers  would  have  returned  to  the  States  from  which 
they  were  derived."  If  the  English  Government 
had  not  been  absolutely  determined  on  peace,  if 
they  had  not  crowded  it  down  the  throats  of  the 
American  envoys,  Mr.  Madison  would  have  gone 
home  from  Washington  to  his  own  house,  and 

1  His  part  of  the  town  is  now  called  Quincy. 


228        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

the  different  Ministers  of  War  and  the  Navy 
would  have  gone  to  theirs,  and  the  National 
Government  would  have  stopped. 

Under  such  circumstances,  when  the  year  1820 
came  round,  there  was  no  great  clamor  for  a 
change  of  administration.  James  Monroe  had 
done  no  harm,  if  he  had  done  no  good ;  he  was 
as  good  a  cipher  as  anybody  else  was ;  and  there 
was  absolutely  no  organized  opposition  of  any 
great  importance  to  his  election.  When  the 
time  of  the  election  came,  and  the  electors  gave 
their  votes,  it  proved  that  he  had  all  the  electoral 
votes  but  one.  This  was  the  vote  given  by  the 
sturdy  old  New  Hampshire  man  whose  name 
still  exists  in  honor  in  another  generation,  — 
William  Plumer.  He  said,  when  the  electoral 
college  met  in  New  Hampshire,  that  there  never 
had  been  but  one  President  who  had  received  a 
unanimous  vote,  and  that  he  was  not  going  to 
have  another  so  chosen  by  his  act,  and  he  threw 
his  vote,  therefore,  for  John  Quincy  Adams. 

It  was  before  this  period,  July  10,  1817,  after 
Mr.  Monroe  had  been  in  office  three  months,  that 
a  writer  in  the  Columbia  Centinel  in  Boston 
spoke  of  his  election  to  the  presidency  as  mark 
ing  an  "  era  of  good  feeling."  It  was  not  a  bad 
name,  and  it  lingered  in  a  fashion  for  a  genera- 


THE   ERA   OF   GOOD    FEELING  229 

tion  among  the  people  who  had  nothing  better 
to  do  than  to  talk  politics.  In  fact,  the  real 
interest  of  the  country  did  not  turn,  as  I  have 
tried  to  show,  on  the  accidents  of  the  presidential 
election.  It  would,  however,  be  to  the  last  de 
gree  absurd  to  suppose  that  because  nothing 
u  happened "  in  the  line  of  political  events 
which  the  Dryasdusts  like  to  write  down,  noth 
ing  "  transpired"  in  the  eight  years  of  Monroe's 
dynasty.  The  country  began  to  gird  itself  up 
to  the  business  of  what  was  called  internal  im 
provement,  which  meant  the  creation  of  better 
roads  and  of  canals,  which  developed  into  the 
railroad  system  of  to-day.  The  people  who  call 
themselves  the  historians  do  not  care  to  write  of 
such  things ;  but  in  truth  the  opening  of  a  great 
canal  has  much  more  to  do  with  the  progress  of 
the  world  than  most  of  the  battles  which  have 
been  fought  on  the  sea  or  on  the  land.  More 
gunpowder  is  used  in  peace  than  in  war.  War 
so  far  arrests  the  advance  of  the  world  in  the 
civilized  arts  that,  though  it  uses  in  the  killing 
of  men  such  a  quantity  of  gunpowder,  it  does 
not  use  so  much  as  would  have  been  used  had 
the  world  been  working  together  about  its 
business. 


230        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

DISTANCE   THEN  AND   DISTANCE  NOW 

This  will  be  the  best  place  to  say  that  almost 
all  the  readers  of  this  generation  read  the  history 
of  the  first  fifty  years  of  the  Nation  without  any 
fit  apprehension  of  what  were  practically  the 
distances  in  those  days.  It  seems  impossible  to 
make  such  readers  understand  how  far  apart  the 
States  were  from  each  other,  and  how  little  peo 
ple  knew  each  other.  Steamboats  made  the 
beginning  of  a  change.  Railroads  carried  it 
farther.  And  since  the  railroads  came  in,  the 
telegraph  and  the  telephone  have  done  the 
rest. 

But  even  in  1814,  seven  years  after  the  Cler- 
mont  made  her  voyage  up  the  Hudson,  Gallatin 
and  Clay  at  Ghent  considered  what  men  called 
the  Northwest  Territory  as  of  little  or  no  value. 
Yet  it  was  the  territory  north  of  our  Illinois, 
west  of  Lake  Michigan.  "  You  will  have  noth 
ing  to  do  but  to  take  care  of  the  Indians  there." 
Until  the  first  steamboat  was  launched  upon  the 
Ohio  in  1811,  the  members  of  Congress  from 
Kentucky  would  probably  go  to  Washington  by 
way  of  New  Orleans  and  the  Gulf  of  Mexico.1 
As  late  as  1827  when  Dr.  Holley,  an  eminent 

1  See  page  319,  Chap.  VII,  Internal  Improvement. 


DISTANCE   THEN   AND   DISTANCE   NOW     231 

Boston  preacher,  was  returning  to  Boston  from 
Lexington,  Kentucky,  he  was  coming  by  this 
route  when  he  died  at  sea. 

I  think  that  George  Washington,  if  in  writing 
he  had  said  "my  country"  in  any  of  the  last 
years  of  his  life,  would  have  meant  Virginia. 
If  he  had  used  these  words  in  speaking  of  the 
Nation,  he  would  have  been  careful  to  say  that 
such  was  his  intention.  From  this  physical 
separation  of  States  and  cities,  it  grew  up  as  a 
matter  of  course  that  the  people  at  large  knew 
little  or  perhaps  knew  nothing  of  the  leading 
characters  in  distant  States.  People  had  to  vote 
as  they  were  directed  by  the  handful  of  men  who 
knew  the  political  public  characters  at  Wash 
ington. 

It  was,  then,  perfectly  natural  that  the  mem 
bers  of  Congress  should  take  upon  themselves 
the  duty  which  in  the  arrangements  of  to-day 
devolve  on  the  great  quadrennial  conventions  of 
the  great  political  parties.  And  up  to  the  elec 
tion  of  Harrison  in  the  autumn  of  1840,  they 
exercised  a  great  deal  of  power  in  such  matters. 
But  even  at  that  time  the  railroads  and  the 
steamboats  had  begun  to  make  great  conven 
tions  possible.  In  the  exciting  political  canvass 
which  swept  old  Tippecanoe  into  place,  many 


232         MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

great  conventions  were  held.  A  convention  of 
young  men,  as  it  was  called,  from  all  parts  of 
the  Nation  was  held  in  Baltimore.  On  this  oc 
casion,  one  of  the  delegates  was  killed,  I  think, 
by  some  accident.  It  was  agreed  in  the  conven 
tion  that  every  delegate  should  pay  one  dollar 
to  a  fund  for  his  widow.  It  was  thought  that 
this  would  give  to  her  twenty  thousand  dollars. 
And  I  know  that,  in  fact,  the  Massachusetts 
delegates  paid  one  thousand  dollars  into  this 
fund.  The  occasion  was  the  first  test  of  the 
resources  of  the  railroads  in  carrying  large  num 
bers  of  people  on  special  occasions. 

As  early  as  May  21,  1832,  a  Democratic  con 
vention  called  nominally  for  the  Democratic 
party  had  met  in  Baltimore.  I  think  this  was 
the  first  National  convention.  It  was  taken  for 
granted  that  General  Jackson  would  be  chosen 
a  second  time.  This  first  Baltimore  convention 
named  Mr.  Van  Buren  as  Vice-President.  Two 
hundred  and  eighty-three  persons  voted. 

If  the  system  of  the  choice  of  President  by 
electors  had  not  now  gone  hopelessly  to  pieces, 
we  should  avail  ourselves  of  the  railroad  system 
by  making  the  electors  take  the  responsibility 
which  in  theory  the  Constitution  imposes  upon 
them.  As  it  stands,  each  party  elects,  or  affects 


THE   MISSOURI    QUESTION  233 

to  elect,  its  members  for  National  nominating 
conventions  ;  but  these  conventions  are  not 
known  to  the  Constitution,  and  hardly  known 
to  the  law.  Still,  the  irresponsible  delegates 
chosen  by  them  really  elect  the  President  and 
Vice-President,  or  try  to. 

It  would  be  better  in  theory,  according  to  me, 
if  each  party  made  in  each  State  the  best  can 
vass  it  could  for  its  "favorite  son,"  without  any 
National  convention.  Then  when  the  election 
came,  the  voters  of  each  party  would  express  the 
wish  of  their  State,  and  would  choose  its  pro 
portion  of  electors.  Then  you  could  have  the 
electoral  college  really  meet  at  some  central 
city.  They  could  ballot  as  often  as  they  liked, 
meeting  in  one  caucus,  or  two  or  three,  till  all 
men  should  know  which  of  the  different  candi 
dates  had  the  largest  support  among  the  people. 
But  this  system  could  not  grow  up  in  the  begin 
ning,  because  there  were  no  railroads,  and  prac 
tically  it  cannot  grow  up  now. 

THE   MISSOURI   QUESTION 

When  you  count  thirty-two  years  from  1787, 
you  come  out  to  1819.  A  generation  of  men  has 
passed,  and  you  have  to  do  your  work  over 
again.  By  a  struggle  such  as  Congress  had 


234        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

never  known  before,  in  which  the  North  and 
South  were  divided  against  each  other,  what  was 
called  Mr.  Clay's  Compromise  of  1820  prevailed 
after  a  year.  Under  that  compromise,  with 
always  increasing  difficulties,  the  Nation  worked 
along  for  another  generation,  and  then  in  1853, 
in  another  generation,  if  you  please,  a  few  reck 
less  men,  blindly  confident  in  their  own  success, 
undertook  to  disown  the  measure  of  1820,  and 
tried  to  force  slavery  on  the  regions  which  had 
been  exempt  by  Mr.  Clay's  plan ;  and  the  dragon 
was  waked  up  again.  This  time  his  head  was 
cut  off,  and  in  that  particular  form  the  ques 
tion  was  settled  forever,  after  thirty-three  more 
years. 

Of  Mr.  Monroe's  so-called  administration,  and 
the  interior  politics  of  what  is  called  the  Cabinet, 
we  have  the  most  edifying  and  interesting  ac 
count  in  what  is  printed  of  the  journal  of  John 
Quincy  Adams.  Mr.  Monroe  recalled  Adams 
from  England  in  1816  and  made  him  Secretary 
of  State.  Now,  the  unwritten  theory  had  held 
since  Jefferson  came  in  that  the  Secretary  of 
State  was  a  good  available  candidate  for  the 
Presidency.  Jefferson  himself  had  been  Secre 
tary  of  State,  Madison  had  been  Secretary  of 
State,  and  Monroe  had  been  Secretary  of  State. 


THE   MISSOURI    QUESTION  235 

Naturally  enough,  the  impression  had  been 
wrought  into  people's  minds  that  the  Secre 
tary  of  State  would  succeed  the  President,  other 
things  being  equal.  I  suppose  Mr.  Adams^ 
thought  so.  But  if  he  did  think  so  he  reckoned 


JOHN  QUINCY  ADAMS. 
After  an  engraving  from  the  portrait  by  A.  B.  Durand. 

without  his  host,  for  the  Virginians  and  people 
who  believed  in  politics  as  a  trade  had  no  such 
intentions.  The  business  of  the  country,  so  far 
as  it  came  into  the  Cabinet  or  these  discussions, 
seems  to  have  been  quite  secondary  to  the  in 
trigues  of  Mr.  Adams's  friends,  and  Mr.  Cal- 


236         MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 


houn's  friends,  and  Mr.  Wirt's  friends,  and  Mr. 
Crawford's  friends,  as  to  the  succession.  To  us 
at  this  time  what  is  most  curious  in  the  very  in 
teresting  volumes  of  Mr.  Adams's  Journal  which 
have  been  published  is  to  see  how  little,  on  the 

whole,  any  of  them  es 
teemed  the  importance 
of  the  slavery  question. 
Mr.  Crawford  withdrew 
from  public  life  on  ac 
count  of  ill  health.  Mr. 
Adams  and  Mr.  Calhonn 
lived  to  see  that  all 
things  beside  were  not 
so  important  as  this 
question  which  involved 

WILLIAM  HARRIS  CRAWFORD.  eternal  principles.  Bllt 
Engraved  by  S.  H.  Gimber  from  ?  ,1  i  •  ,  /•  ,1 

a  painting  by  J.W.Darvis.          °f     the     history     of      the 

anti-slavery  movement  it 

will  be  more  convenient  to  speak  in  another 
place. 

While  I  speak  of  Mr.  Monroe  himself  as  a 
person  comparatively  insignificant,  I  do  not,  of 
course,  mean  that  those  eight  years  from  1817  to 
1825  were  in  any  sort  insignificant.  It  is  in 
these  years  that  the  curtain  rises  for  those  who 
study  the  great  drama  of  the  century.  The 


THE   MISSOURI    QUESTION 


237 


drama  begins  with  the  gray  dawn,  half  twilight, 
through  which  you  dimly  see  a  vague,  distant 
prospect.  The  hero  of  the  drama,  the  stripling 
nation,  comes  forward  alone,  doubtful  and  even 
timid.  The  world  is  out  of  joint,  and  can  he  set 
it  right  ?  The  curtain  falls,  at  the  end  of  the 
century,  really  on  the  first  part  of  a  trilogy. 
The  stripling  boy,  loose-jointed,  ignorant,  and 
doubtful,  appears  then  as 
the  strong  man,  borrow 
ing  omnipotence  for  the 
duties  God  trusts  to  him, 
and  still  wondering  what 
those  duties  are. 

One  of  the  great  ques 
tions  which  the  young 
stripling  must  decide  is 
the  question  of  freedom 
or  slavery  in  the  region 
west  of  the  Mississippi. 
The  battle  royal  comes 
on  which  was  timidly 
pushed  off  in  1787,  and  which  has  been  dreaded 
for  thirty  years,  —  a  generation  of  men.  It  is 
not  often  that  great  questions  are  settled  once 
for  all ;  generation  after  generation  comes  up  to 
a  new  round  in  the  battle.  And  so  it  was  now. 


JOHN  CALDWELL  CALHOUN. 
From  a  miniature  by  Blan 
ch  ard. 


238        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

The  Constitution  had  in  its  way  settled  this 
question  by  what  are  called  the  "  Compromises  " 
of  the  Constitution.  But  after  thirty-two  years, 
with  another  generation  of  men  on  the  stage,  it 
insisted,  as  I  have  said,  on  being  settled  again. 
It  returned  under  the  title  of  the  "  Missouri  Con 
troversy." 

In  the  admission  of  the  Gulf  States  of  Ala 
bama  and  Mississippi,  they  followed  the  law  or 
custom  of  Georgia,  to  which,  in  some  fashion, 
their  territory  had  belonged.  With  the  admis 
sion  of  Kentucky  and  Tennessee,  in  the  same 
way,  it  had  been  taken  for  granted,  almost,  that 
they  would  be  slave  States  because  they  were 
settled  from  Virginia  and  North  Carolina.  On 
the  other  hand,  for  the  States  north  of  the  Ohio, 
the  admirable  forecast  of  the  "  Northwest  Ordi 
nance,"  1787,  so  called,  had  forever  exempted 
them  from  the  institution  of  slavery.  With 
more  or  less  questioning  as  to  the  permanency 
of  the  provision  of  "  the  Ordinance,"  as  we  still 
call  it,  Indiana  was  admitted  to  the  Union  in 
1816,  and  Illinois  in  1818.  So  far,  so  good. 
After  serious  controversy,  all  the  States  east  of 
the  Mississippi  River,  and  the  State  of  Louisiana, 
made  out  of  the  French  population  at  the  mouth 
of  the  river,  took  their  status  in  advance  regard- 


THE   MISSOURI   QUESTION  239 

ing  the  institution  of  slavery.  It  was  not  until 
one  State  west  of  the  Mississippi,  made  from  the 
Louisiana  Purchase,  was  ready  for  admission 
that  the  question  as  to  its  future  status  in  this 
matter  could  come  to  a  critical  contest.  That 
State,  as  it  proved,  was  Missouri. 

In  1803  and  1804,  when  we  had  just  bought 
Louisiana  from  Napoleon,  it  was  taken  for 
granted  that  we  should  not  send  emigrants 
across  the  river  for  a  hundred  years.  That 
was  Livingston's  opinion,  as  it  has  been  cited 
already  in  these  pages.1  One  must  not  wonder, 
therefore,  that  little  or  nothing  was  said,  even 
in  the  bitter  debates  on  the  Louisiana  Purchase, 
as  to  the  existence  of  slavery  in  territory  so  far 
away,  and  so  sure  to  remain  in  barbarism.  But 
there  was  already  a  French  post  at  St.  Louis, 
and  one  or  two  garrisons  farther  down  the  river, 
on  its  western  shore.  As  fifteen  years  went  on, 
this  post  at  St.  Louis  became  more  and  more 
populous.  It  was  the  depot  of  the  fur  trade  of 
the  West.  Without  questions  on  any  part,  its 
people  followed  the  habit  of  the  original  settlers, 
and  bought  negroes  for  slaves  where  they  chose 
and  where  they  could.  In  1820  there  were  not 
five  thousand  inhabitants  in  St.  Louis.  Around 

i  See  p.  33. 


240        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

it,  however,  the  natural  resources  of  the  country 
had  called  in  settlers  in  large  numbers,  and  a 
population  of  sixty-six  thousand  people,  of  whom 
ten  thousand  were  slaves,  had  already  collected 
itself  in  this  region,  where  Livingston  had  told 
Europe,  seventeen  years  before,  that  we  should 
not  send  an  emigrant.  Those  of  these  new 
settlers  who  were  white  and  who  owned  slaves 
had  taken  them  there  without  scruple,  perhaps 
without  hesitation.  In  their  application  to  be 
made  a  State,  they  took  it  for  granted,  or 
affected  to,  that  their  right  to  their  slaves 
would  be  recognized. 

It  was  at  this  point  that  the  contest  came. 
The  whole  institution  of  slavery  was  on  a  dif 
ferent  basis  from  what  it  had  been  when  Jeffer 
son  came  to  the  Presidency.  At  that  time  he 
and  Madison  and  the  leaders  of  Virginia  were 
discussing,  in  an  academical  way,  the  best 
methods  of  bringing  the  wasteful  system  of 
slave  labor  to  an  end.  At  the  same  time,  the 
exclusion,  in  the  year  1808,  of  African  slaves 
by  a  Constitutional  prohibition  gave  an  artificial 
value  in  money  to  the  negroes  born  from  slaves 
already  existing  in  the  country.  I  suppose  that 
if,  in  1803,  a  vigorous  effort  had  been  made  to 
exclude  slavery  from  the  territory  bought  from 


THE   MISSOURI   QUESTION  241 

Napoleon,  such  a  measure  would  have  had  the 
assent  of  the  States  of  Delaware,  Maryland,  and 
Virginia.  But  as  early  as  1819  it  was  quite 
impossible  to  secure  any  such  assent.  Southern 
men  were  beginning  to  look  at  slavery  in  a 
much  more  favorable  light  than  that  in  which 
the  wisest  of  their  fathers  generally  regarded 
it.  And  so  it  was  that  the  proposal  that  the 
State  of  Missouri  should  exclude  slavery  for  the 
future  failed  to  receive  the  assent  of  any  South 
ern  State. 

So  soon  as  the  bill  for  the  admission  of  Mis 
souri  was  introduced  into  the  House,  it  was 
amended  so  as  to  prohibit  the  introduction  of 
slavery,  and  to  declare  free,  at  the  age  of 
twenty-one,  all  negro  children  who  had  been 
born  in  the  Territory.  This  amendment  passed 
the  House. 

But,  as  we  all  know,  it  is  easier  to  legislate 
for  the  future  than  for  the  past.  In  hard  fact, 
there  were  already  ten  thousand  negro  slaves  in 
Missouri.  There  were  fifty  thousand  whites. 
To  take  care  of  the  future  of  people  yet  un 
born  would  be  one  thing.  To  change  the  status 
of  every  black  person  who  should  come  to  the 
age  of  twenty-one  was  quite  another.  This  for 
matter  of  detail.  Then,  as  a  matter  of  prin- 


242        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

ciple,  it  is  easy  to  see  that  the  Southern  leaders 
did  not  mean  to  cut  off  the  right  of  emigration 
from  Eastern  States  to  Western  territory  with 
the  slaves  who  were  their  property.  And  when 
the  bill,  as  amended,  went  to  the  Senate,  it  was 
rejected  by  a  vote  of  twenty-two  to  sixteen. 
The  bill  went  back  to  the  House,  and  failed  by 
the  disagreement  of  the  House. 

The  subject  was  brought  up  again  at  the  next 
session.  The  North  was  at  a  disadvantage,  for 
here  were  already  ten  thousand  slaves  in  the 
new  State.  The  debates  would  seem  to  show 
that  the  whole  question  of  "  State  Rights  "  was 
more  considered  than  the  abstract  question  of 
the  right  or  wrong  of  holding  men  as  slaves. 
Even  Calhoun  granted  that  Congress  could  pro 
hibit  slavery  in  the  Territories ;  but  on  "  State 
Rights  "  ground  he  insisted  that  no  act  of  ad 
mission  passed  by  Congress  could  limit  the 
power  of  a  State  after  it  had  changed  from  a 
Territory  to  a  State. 

The  second  time  there  came  a  deadlock  be 
tween  the  Senate  and  the  House.  The  Sen 
ate,  as  before,  amended  the  bill  by  striking  out 
the  anti-slavery  proviso.  The  House,  as  before, 
disagreed  to  the  Senate  amendment. 

To  obtain  some  "  method  of  living,"  a  Senator 


THE   MISSOURI   QUESTION 


243 


from  the  Northwest  proposed  a  new  section  to 
the  bill.  This  was  what  we  know  as  the  "  Mis 
souri  Compromise."  For  this  one  time  a  slave 
State  was  to  be  received  north  of  the  line  of 
thirty-six  degrees  and  thirty  minutes,  the  south 
ern  line  of  Missouri,  and  with  the  proviso  that 
the  same  should  not 
be  allowed  again. 
This  proposal,  which 
passed  the  Senate, 
was  once  rejected  by 
the  House  ;  but,  under 
the  influence  of  Mr. 
Clay,  who  was  Speaker 
of  the  House,  it  finally 
obtained  just  enough 
votes  for  its  passage. 
Missouri  was  admit 
ted  on  the  10th  of 

August,  1821,  with  a  constitution  authorizing 
slavery  on  condition  that  no  other  slave  States 
should  be  admitted  north  of  the  southern  line 
of  Missouri.  At  that  time  there  were  twenty- 
two  States.  Eleven  were  free  and  eleven  slave. 
The  vote  in  the  Senate,  therefore,  was  equally 
divided  between  North  and  South.  But  the 
greater  population  of  the  Northern  States  gave 


HENRY  CLAY  AS  A  YOUNG  MAN. 


244        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

that  section  a  majority  of  twenty-five  in  the 
House.  The  amended  bill,  when  it  first  came 
from  the  Senate,  was  rejected  in  the  House  by 
a  vote  of  159  to  18.  But  after  a  vote  of  the 
Committee  on  Conference,  every  Southern  Rep 
resentative  voted  in  the  affirmative ;  and  the 
votes  of  fourteen  Northern  members  were  obtained 
for  the  "  Compromise  "  with  great  difficulty,  and 
for  many  varied  reasons,  different,  perhaps,  with 
every  vote  from  those  given  for  every  other. 

The  contract  thus  made  between  the  North 
and  South  was  an  agreement,  broken  in  1854, 
when  the  Southern  leaders,  really  crazy  with  their 
success,  proposed  to  repeal  the  anti-slavery  pro 
vision  in  establishing  the  Territory,  as  it  was 
called,  of  Nebraska,  west  of  the  State  of  Missouri. 

At  the  moment  when  the  "  Compromise " 
passed  Congress  the  feeling  of  the  North 
touching  anti-slavery  matters  for  the  future  had 
been  more  distinctly  announced  than  it  had  ever 
been  before.  In  December,  1819,  there  was  a 
great  popular  meeting  held  in  the  Doric  Hall  of 
the  State  House  in  Massachusetts,  under  the 
lead  of  Daniel  Webster,  who  made  a  strong 
speech  insisting  upon  the  duty  of  the  North  to 
reject  all  proposals  which  could  enslave  the 
States  made  west  of  the  Mississippi. 


THE   MISSOURI    QUESTION  245 

The  substance  of  that  speech  is  in  the  address 
which  that  meeting  sent  out  to  the  people  of 
Massachusetts.  And  it  is  one  of  the  infamous 
suppressions  of  history  that  in  George  Ticknor 
Curtis's  life  of  Mr.  Webster  all  allusion  to  this 
address  is  omitted,  —  undoubtedly  intentionally 
omitted. 

What  was  called  the  "  Compromise  "  did  not 
for  a  moment  suppress  the  feeling  of  protest.  I 
have  heard  it  said,  and  believe  it  to  be  true,  that 
hardly  one  of  the  fourteen  Northern  men  whose 
votes  were  given  for  it  was  ever  returned  to 
Congress.  I  know  that  the  two  or  three  New 
England  men  who  voted  for  it  came  home  to 
find  themselves  very  coldly  treated  by  their  con 
stituents.  All  the  same,  however,  Missouri  was 
admitted  into  the  United  States,  the  more  read 
ily  because  of  the  district  of  Maine.  This  had 
always  been  a  part  of  Massachusetts,  had  been  al 
ready  admitted  on  the  15th  of  March,  1820.  This 
gave  the  North  two  more  senators  and  was 
scored  as  so  far  a  Northern  victory.  The  men 
who  wanted  to  push  the  slavery  question  off 
could  say  and  did  say  that  Missouri  and  Maine 
were,  so  to  speak,  paired  against  each  other.  So 
much  precedent  was  there  given  to  a  sort  of 
general  understanding  that  if  you  admitted  a 


246        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

Northern  State,  you  must  admit  a  Southern 
State.  And  people  would  tell  you  that  Michigan 
and  Iowa  were  paired  against  Florida  and  Ar 
kansas.  This  did  not  mean  that  in  either  case 
two  States  were  admitted  by  the  same  bill ;  but 
it  meant  that  the  opposition  to  the  admission  of 
Southern  States  was  to  a  certain  extent  lulled 
because  equal  strength  was  added  or  could  be 
added  on  the  Northern  side. 

THE   MONROE   DOCTRINE 

James  Monroe  now  lives  in  history  because, 
fortunately  for  him,  his  name  is  attached  to  the 
Monroe  Doctrine.  In  1823  George  Canning 
made  the  suggestion  of  something  of  the  same 
sort  to  Mr.  Rush,  who  was  our  Minister  in 
London. 

I  think  that  the  earliest  memorandum  on 
paper  of  the  project  is  in  John  Quincy  Adams's 
letter  to  Mr.  Rush  of  the  2d  of  July,  1823. 
"  A  necessary  consequence  [of  the  independence 
of  the  South  American  States]  will  be  that  the 
American  Continent  will  be  no  longer  subject  to 
colonization."  Canning's  conversation  with  Mr. 
Rush  took  place  in  the  next  month.  He  pro 
poses  a  joint  declaration  of  England  and  the 
United  States  that  they  would  not  view  with 


THE   MONROE   DOCTEINE 


247 


indifference  any  foreign  intervention  in  America. 
That  conversation,  when  reported  at  Washing 
ton,  called  the  attention  of  the  President  to  the 


W 


GEORGE  CANNING. 
From  a  sketch  made  in  the  House  of  Commons,  March,  1826. 

matter,  and  Monroe  asked  the  opinion  of  Madi 
son  and  Jefferson,  who  were  both  retired  from 
office.  Jefferson  in  reply  said  squarely,  "  Our 
second  maxim  should  be,  never  to  suffer  Europe 
to  intermeddle  with  cis- Atlantic  affairs."  Mr. 


248         MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

Madison,  referring  to  some  threats  on  the  part  of 
the  Holy  Alliance,  said  that  "  they  call  for  our 
efforts  to  defeat  the  meditated  crusade."  The 
President's  message  is  dated  the  2d  of  December 
in  that  year.  It  contains  the  celebrated  pas 
sage,  "  We  owe  it  to  candor  ...  to  declare  that 
we  should  consider  any  attempt  on  the  part  of 
the  allied  powers  to  extend  their  system  to  any 
portion  of  this  hemisphere  as  dangerous  to  our 
peace  and  safety."  So  far  the  "  Holy  Alliance  " 
is  alluded  to.  And  this  statement  goes  no  far 
ther,  but  the  message  goes  on  to  say, "  We  could 
not  view  any  interposition  for  the  purpose  of 
oppressing  [the  South  American  States]  or  con 
trolling,  in  any  manner,  their  destiny  by  any 
European  power,  in  any  other  light  than  as  a 
manifestation  of  an  unfriendly  disposition  toward 
the  United  States." 

The  next  year  he  says :  "  It  is  gratifying  to 
know  that  some  of  the  powers  with  whom  we 
enjoy  a  very  friendly  intercourse  and  to  whom 
these  views  have  been  communicated  have  ap 
peared  to  acquiesce  in  them." 

William  Plumer  in  his  biography  says  that 
the  President  told  Adams  that  he  had  doubts 
about  that  part  of  the  message  of  1823  which 
related  to  the  interference  of  the  Holy  Alliance 


PERSONAL   AND   GENEALOGICAL  249 

with  Spanish  America.  He  said  he  believed  it 
had  better  be  omitted,  and  asked  him  if  he  did 
not  think  so  too.  Adams  replied :  "  You  have 
my  sentiments  on  the  subject  already,  and  I  see 
no  reason  to  alter  them."  "Well,"  said  the 
President,  "  it  is  written,  and  I  will  not  change 
it  now."  This  was  a  day  or  two  before  Congress 
met. 

It  seems  probable  that  John  Quincy  Adams 
drew  the  passage  which  has  given  Mr.  Monroe, 
fairly  enough,  the  honor  of  naming  the  proviso. 

PEKSONAL   AND    GENEALOGICAL 

The  reader  of  these  pages  will  have  to  follow 
a  good  many  memoranda  in  the  Everett  hand 
writing  ;  and  it  will  save  footnotes  or  other  ex 
planations  if  once  for  all  I  account  here  for  my 
own  middle  name  of  Everett.  It  will  be  enough 
to  say  that  in  the  first  generation  of  Massachu 
setts  Bay  as  early  as  1636  appears  Richard  Ever 
ett.  It  is  supposed  that  he  first  settled  in  Water- 
town,  Massachusetts.  But  in  1638  he  is  called 
"  Richard  Evered  of  Dedham  in  New  England, 
Pharier."  I  suppose  this  means  farrier.  He  seems 
to  have  been  respected  in  the  town.  He  died  July 
3,  1682.  In  1667  the  town  paid  to  him  twenty 
shillings  as  its  bounty  for  killing  two  wolves.  The 


250        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

descent  struggles  along,  always  in  the  Everett 
name,  through  the  regular  eight  generations,  the 
most  prominent  person  in  it  being  a  commander 
of  the  train-bands  who  was  frequently  on  perma 
nent  duty  in  New  Hampshire  and  Maine.1  I 
think  he  was  somewhere  in  that  region  at  the 
time  of  Lo veil's  fight.  From  this  blood  there 
appears  in  South  Dedham,  otherwise  called  Tiot, 
now  known  as  Norwood,  Ebenezer  Everett, 
whose  house  was  standing  there  a  few  years  ago. 
He  had  had  the  courage  and  good  sense  to  go 
over  to  Andover  and  marry  Joanna  Stevens,  of  the 
Andover  Stevens  blood.  Of  their  children,  Moses 
Everett  and  Oliver  Everett  were  sent  to  Harvard 
College.  Oliver  Everett  graduated  there  in  1772. 
The  first  time  I  was  ever  at  a  formal  dinner 
party,  being  a  rather  frightened  young  man  of 
twenty,  I  met  dear  old  Dr.  John  Pierce,  who 
called  himself  in  joke  the  Catalogarius  of  Har 
vard  College.  He  spoke  to  me  across  the  table, 
breaking  up  the  other  conversation  to  say,  "  Mr. 
Hale,  your  grandfather,  Oliver  Everett,  was  born 
in  1752,  graduated  in  1772,  took  charge  of  the 
New  South  Church  in  1782,  left  that  Church  in 
1792,  died  in  1802  ;  you  were  born  in  1822,  and 

1 A  good   guess  supposes  that  Everett  was  originally  the 
Dutch  name  Evaert  or  Evarts. 


PERSONAL   AND    GENEALOGICAL  251 

will  take  your  second  degree  in  1842."  It  was 
one  of  the  instances,  almost  absurd,  of  the  curi 
ous  accuracy  of  his  memory  in  any  detail  which 
related  to  college  history.  To  me  it  has  been  a 
very  convenient  memorandum.  It  is  a  little  hard 
for  us  to  connect  the  statistics  of  our  personal  life 
with  the  chronology  in  books.  I  once  had,  as  a 
piece  of  hack  duty,  to  write  the  life  of  Wolfgang 
von  Goethe  in  the  same  summer  in  which  I  wrote 
the  life  of  my  great-uncle,  Nathan  Hale.  I  con 
fess  I  was  a  good  deal  surprised  when  I  found 
that  Goethe,  whose  death  I  remember,  was  born 
five  years  before  Nathan  Hale,  who  was  killed 
by  General  Howe  in  the  autumn  of  1776. 

Both  my  grandfathers  were  born  in  the  last 
half  of  the  eighteenth  century,  Enoch  Hale  in 
1754,  Oliver  Everett  two  years  earlier.  For  ten 
years  he  was  minister  of  the  New  South  Church 
in  Boston,  where  he  was  a  predecessor  of  Kirk- 
land,  who  went  from  that  pulpit  to  be  President 
of  Harvard  College.  His  second  son  was  Alex 
ander  Hill  Everett,  with  whom  this  reader  will 
have  a  good  deal  to  do.  His  third  son  was 
Edward  Everett,  whose  name  I  bear.  His  sec 
ond  daughter  was  Sarah  Preston  Everett,  who 
was  my  mother.  Oliver  Everett's  health  failed 
him  so  far  that  he  could  not  carry  on  the  duties 


252        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 


of  a  large  Boston    parish.     His  brother  Moses 
Everett   was   a  minister  in  Dorchester,  now  a 

part  of  the  municipality 
of  Boston. 

I  suppose  this  was 
the  reason  why  Oliver 
Everett,  when  he  retired 
from  his  ministry  in 
Boston,  bought  a  house, 
which  was  pulled  down 
only  a  year  ago,  which 
stood  on  what  is  known 
as  Edward  Everett  square 
in  Dorchester.  In  this 
house  my  mother  was 
born,  on  a  day  ever  to  be  marked  with  red 
in  the  history  of  my  own  family  —  the  5th  of 
September,  1796. 

I  was  sorry  enough  when  the  supposed  exi 
gencies  of  modern  life  made  it  necessary  to  pull 
down  this  building,  which  really  belonged  to  what 
are  called  the  colonial  days.1  I  suppose  it  to 

1  Purists  say  "  provincial  days  "  when  they  speak  of  the  period 
after  Massachusetts  was  a  "  province  "  until  the  19th  of  April, 
1775.  But  we  people  in  the  Bay,  who  are  in  fact  a  little  pro 
vincial,  do  not  like  to  be  called  provincial,  so  we  speak  of  a 
"  colonial "  house,  even  of  a  house  built  in  the  eighteenth  cen 
tury,  the  century  of  "  The  Province." 


ALEXANDER  HILL  EVERETT. 
From  an  early  miniature. 


PERSONAL   AND    GENEALOGICAL  253 

have  been  built  by  one  of  the  West  Indian 
planters  who  used  to  like  to  come  up  from 
the  islands  to  live  for  the  summer  in  Boston  or 
its  neighborhood.  Jamaica  Plain  is  named  for 
such  people.  Some  of  them  had  the  wit  to  plant 
English  walnuts  at  the  Dorchester  house  which 
throve  and  bore  fruit,  as,  for  some  reason,  Eng 
lish  walnuts  do  not  seem  to  do  when  they  are 
planted  in  New  England  now.  My  mother  her 
self  planted  a  honeysuckle  there  before  the  year 
1806;  and  for  the  convenience  of  gardeners  I 
may  say  that  this  plant  was  alive  in  the  year 
1895.  The  stem  was  at  that  time  three  or  four 
inches  through.  In  this  house  my  grandfather 
died  in  the  year  1802,  when  his  sons  were  but 
boys,  leaving  my  grandmother  to  bring  up  a 
family  of  eight  children.  Two  of  those  children, 
Alexander  Hill  Everett  and  Edward  Everett, 
lived  to  hold  distinguished  positions  in  the  ad 
ministration  of  the  State  of  Massachusetts  or  of 
the  Nation.  John  Everett,  his  fourth  son,  who 
came  next  after  my  mother  in  the  family,  had 
a  very  brilliant  career  in  college,  and  died  at  the 
age  of  twenty-eight.  Ralph  Waldo  Emerson, 
who  was  in  college  with  him,  often  spoke  to  me 
of  his  remarkable  ability  and  promise. 

In  what  now  seems  to   me    rather  a  belter- 


254        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

skelter  way,  my  mother  grew  up  in  this  wid 
ow's  household,  her  father  having  died  when 
she  was  six  years  old.  In  after  life  she  almost 
worshipped  the  two  brothers,  Alexander  and  Ed 
ward,  who  from  her  earliest  recollections  had  in 
terested  themselves  in  her  education.  So  little 
had  schools  to  do  with  this  education  that  I  can 
not  at  this  moment  name  any  of  her  school 
teachers.  But  her  brother  Alexander  went  to 
St.  Petersburg  in  1809 ;  and  in  his  first  letter 
to  her  he  proposes  that  this  girl  of  thirteen 
shall  write  to  him  in  French,  and  this  she  seems 
to  have  done. 

Her  brother  Edward  went  to  Germany  in 
1815,  and  either  then  or  before  she  mastered 
the  German  language,  and  I  cannot  remember 
the  time  when  she  did  not  read  it  with  ease. 
This  is  now  a  common  accomplishment,  but  as 
late  as  1830  she  could  not  buy  a  German  book 
in  Boston.1  The  duties  of  life  under  rather 
struggling  pecuniary  circumstances  in  a  vil 
lage  like  Dorchester  gave  her  a  sort  of  house 
hold  training  such  as  is  harder  for  a  young 
woman  to  have  in  our  days.  As  early  as 

1  In  1843  I  tried  in  Philadelphia  to  buy  some  German  books 
for  her.  But  I  could  find  only  Goethe,  Schiller,  the  German 
Bible,  and  the  German  hymn  book. 


PERSONAL   AND   GENEALOGICAL 


255 


1807  she  enjoyed,  as  a  girl  would  enjoy,  the 
friendship  and  advice  of  Joseph  Stevens  Buck- 
minster,  who  was  the  minister  of  Brattle  Street 
Church.  Thus  she  gained  on  Sundays  the  im- 


THE  EVERETT  HOUSE  AT  DORCHESTER. 

mense  advantage  of  his  emancipation  from  the 
mechanical  religion  of  the  preceding  century. 
Such  training  as  this  for  a  girl  who  had  thor 
oughly  sound  health  and  a  temper  of  great 
sweetness  and  even  balance  made  an  all-round 
woman,  a  little  of  the  Die  Vernon  type  if 


256        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

you  please,  of  whom  there  were  not  many  in 
New  England  in  the  first  twenty  years  of  the 
century.  Such  a  girl  twelve  years  of  age  was  in 
the  home  to  which  Alexander  Hill  Everett  took 
his  Exeter  friend  Hale  on  their  first  vacation 
visit  to  Boston.  One  of  the  traditions  of  the 
family  is  that  when  her  brother  and  his  friend 
for  the  first  time  cut  off  the  queues  which  had 
adorned  their  young  heads  until  then,  they  gave 
them  to  her  to  make  hair  for  her  doll.  Another 
similar  tradition  of  about  the  same  time  is  that 
when  they  came  home  from  a  Phi  Beta  dinner 
at  Cambridge  they  gave  her  for  the  millinery 
of  the  baby  house  the  pink  and  blue  ribbons 
from  their  Phi  Beta  medals.  But  girls  of 
twelve  grow  up  to  be  women  of  twenty,  and 
sometimes  they  marry  their  brothers'  nearest 
friends.  My  mother  married  one  dear  friend 
of  one  dear  brother  the  day  she  was  twenty 
years  old,  which,  as  I  have  already  said,  is  a 
day  to  be  marked  with  vermilion  by  me  and 
mine. 

From  this  marriage  began  a  happy  life  for 
her  and  her  husband,  with  every  range  of  ex 
perience  and  fortune,  of  which  these  pages  need 
say  nothing  more  but  what  relates  to  the  more 
public  affairs  of  the  century. 


1808   TO    1840 


CHAPTER  VI 


1808   TO   1840 
THE   OTHER   SIDE   OF   THE   WATER 

I  TURN  for  a  few  pages  from  America  to 
Europe.  I  have  a  series  of  letters  between 
John  Quincy  Adams  and  Mr.  Alexander  Everett 
for  fifteen  years 
after  the  War 
of  1812.  Mr. 
Everett  had  gone 
to  Russia  with 
Mr.  Adams  in 
1808  as  his  pri 
vate  secretary. 
He  was  with  him 
there  through 
that  most  inter- 


EMPEROR  ALEXANDER  I. 
From  an  engraving  by  Montaut. 


esting   and   criti 
cal   period   when 
the    Emperor    of 
Russia  stood  so  loyally  to  his  engagements  with 
America  and  to  the  traditions  of  Catherine  and 

259 


260        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

other  neutral  powers.  Because  the  Emperor 
would  not  agree  in  any  form  to  Napoleon's 
Berlin  and  Milan  decrees,  Napoleon  quarrelled 
with  him  and  invaded  his  empire. 

I  must  not  go  into  this.  The  reader  will  find 
it  all  explained  and  illustrated  by  Mr.  Henry 
Adams.  I  only  wish  here  to  say  that  an  inti 
macy  began  between  John  Quincy  Adams  —  a 
veteran  statesman,  as  far  as  American  diplomacy 
went  —  and  Alexander  Everett  as  early  as  1806, 
when  Mr.  Everett  left  Exeter  and  began  the 
study  of  law  in  Mr.  Adams's  office.  That  friend 
ship  continued  unbroken  while  Mr.  Adams  lived. 
From  the  correspondence  which  grew  from  it  I 
shall  make  a  few  extracts.  The  reader  will  see 
that  their  statements  of  fact  are  of  the  first 
authority.  And  I  copy  a  few  of  such  details 
as  explain  the  delay  of  letters  and  the  slowness 
of  travel  to  show  how  different  the  external  con 
ditions  were  from  those  of  our  days. 

The  reader  will  observe  that  it  was  but  a  few 
years  since  the  Weekly  Messenger  had  begun  a 
new  series,  under  my  father's  sole  direction.  It 
was  but  two  years  since  he  had  purchased  the 
Boston  Daily  Advertiser  newspaper,  the  first 
daily  paper  in  New  England.  Our  old-fashioned 
people  call  the  paper  The  Daily  still.  My  mother 


THE   OTHER   SIDE   OF   THE   WATER         261 

used  to  laugh  about  her  indignation  when,  on 
her  wedding  tour,  the  Advertiser  or  the  Messen 
ger  had  followed  them,  and  she  found  that  the 
friendly  compositors  at  the  printing-office  had 
printed  the  names  of  bride  and  bridegroom  in 
letters  unusually  large,  under  the  head  of  "  Mar 
riages."  I  suppose  no  compositor  or  proof-reader 
in  the  office  of  the  Tribune  or  the  Journal  now 
would  take  any  such  liberty,  even  if  he  happened 
to  know  the  name  of  his  chief.  But  to  a  certain 
extent  those  were  still  feudal  days.  From  the 
beginning  of  the  Advertiser  down,  the  editor 
owned  the  printing  plant,  or  owned  enough  of  it 
to  control  its  use.  And  in  such  days  the  count 
ing-room  direction  and  the  editorial  wish  were 
one  and  the  same,  because  both  came  from  one 
and  the  same  man. 

I  must  take  for  granted  what  we  will  hope  is 
true  —  that  all  readers  are  well  informed  as  to 
the  great  crisis  which  culminated  in  the  triumph 
of  neutral  rights  and  the  fall  of  Napoleon.  So  I 
will  venture  to  suppose  that  they  would  prefer 
not  to  read  of  those  half-forgotten  politics.  And 
instead  of  them,  for  the  moment  they  may  forget 
wars  and  rumors  of  wars  and  look  in  on  Cole 
ridge  as  he  lectures  on  "  Love." 

In  1811  Mr.  Everett  left  St.  Petersburg  on 


262        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 


leave  of  absence  and  visited  England.  The  fol 
lowing  passage  gives  a  description  of  one  even 
ing  in  London  as  late  as  1849.  Mr.  Ralph 
Waldo  Emerson  told  me  that  when  his  friends 
were  arranging  for  his  lectures  in  London  in 
1848,  they  went  back  to  the  traditions  of  these 
lectures  by  Coleridge :  — 

"LONDON,  1811. 

"  I  dined  to-day  at  the  Globe  in  company  with 
Mr.  Arnory.      In  the  evening  Frank   Williams 

called  in  and  we 
went  together  to 
Coleridge's  Lecture. 
It  was  on  the  inter 
esting  subject  of  love 
and  the  French  char 
acter  as  delineated  by 
Shakespeare.  Love 
he  defined  to  us 
'  the  perfect  desire  of 
being  united  to  some 
thing  that  we  feel  to 
be  necessary  to  our 
happiness  by  all  the 
means  that  Nature  permits  and  Reason  allows.' 
I  think  he  does  not  shine  in  Definitions.  I 
understand  that  at  a  recent  lecture  which  I  did 


SAMUEL  TAYLOR  COLERIDGE. 
From  an  engraving  of  1809. 


THE   OTHER   SIDE   OF   THE   WATER  263 

not  hear  he  defined  a  poem  to  be  the  natural 
expression  of  a  natural  thought.  He  wished, 
he  said,  to  take  a  middle  course  in  his  idea  of 
Love  between  the  high  Platonists,  that  excludes 
the  idea  of  body,  and  the  gross  materialists  that 
have  no  conception  of  anything  further.  Scott's 
description  went  very  much  to  this  point :  — 

" '  True  Love's  the  gift  that  God  has  given 
To  Man  alone  beneath  the  Heaven. 
It  is  not  Fantasy's  hot  fire 
Whose  wishes  soon  as  granted  fly. 
It  liveth  not  in  wild  desire, 
In  dead  desire  it  doth  not  die. 
It  is  the  secret  sympathy, 
The  silver  cord,  the  silken  tie, 
That  heart  to  heart  and  mind  to  mind 
In  body  and  in  soul  doth  bind.' 

"  He  took  up  the  play  of  Romeo  and  Juliet, 
dividing  the  characters  into  the  general  and  in 
dividual  ones,  the  former  as  Tybalt  and  Capulet, 
the  great  characters  of  the  play.  Mercutio  he 
commended  very  much.  It  had  been  objected, 
he  said,  that  Shakespeare  had  despatched  Mer 
cutio  in  the  third  act  because  he  was  unable  to 
support  him  any  longer.  The  fact  was  that  he 
had  given  him  the  brilliancy  which  he  displays 
while  on  the  stage  in  order  to  excite  an  interest 
in  the  death  and  thus  give  an  air  of  nature  to 


264        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

the  spirit  of  revenge  it  creates  in  Romeo,  by 
which  means  the  death  of  Tybalt  and  the  catas 
trophe  of  the  play  that  hangs  upon  it  are  ren 
dered  probable.  He  advanced  something  in  favor 
of  the  conceits  of  Shakespeare.  He  undertook 
to  consider  the  Nurse,  which  seems  to  be  a  very 
favorite  character  with  him,  for  his  admiration 
was  without  bounds,  and  appeared  so  to  have 
bewildered  his  head  that  he  could  not  descend 
to  particulars  so  as  to  make  the  grounds  of  it 
intelligible.  The  attractive  nature  of  the  sub 
ject  had  brought  together  a  larger.audience  than 
usual,  and  the  ladies  all  concurred  in  saying  that 
it  was  very  pretty.  They  appeared  to  be  disap 
pointed  when  he  finished." 

CHILD   LIFE   IN   BOSTON 

Do  not  let  any  one  think  that  I  am  going 
to  harass  my  readers  with  many  details  as  to 
my  personal  life.  What  we  are  trying  for  is  a 
keyhole  view  of  the  whole  century ;  and  when  I 
speak  of  myself,  it  is  simply  because  the  reader 
and  I,  as  I  keep  saying,  are  looking  through 
the  same  keyhole.  Still,  it  will  be  convenient 
to  all  parties  if  I  say  that  it  was  in  the  twenties 
that  I  began  to  see  matters  with  my  own  eyes. 
On  the  3d  of  April,  1822, 1  came  into  this  world. 


CHILD    LIFE   IN  BOSTON  265 

There  is  a  well-known  reminiscence  of  a  French 
physicist  who  remembered  seeing  the  nurse  raise 
the  curtain  of  his  room  when  he  was  six  hours 
old.  I  do  not  go  back  so  far  as  he,  and  I  do  not 
believe  that  I  recall  anything  of  my  own  observa 
tions  earlier  than  my  sight  of  the  green  feathers  of 
the  Rifle  Rangers  on  the  17th  of  June,  1825,  of 
which  I  have  spoken  already.  A  good  deal  had 
happened  to  me  before  then,  however,  which  I 
cannot  recall.  Thus,  I  could  read  the  printed 
badge  which  was  given  me.  But  I  have  no 
recollection  of  learning  to  read;  not  even  of 
who  taught  me.  I  suppose  it  was  Miss  Susan 
Whitney,  to  whose  school  I  was  sent,  at  my  own 
eager  request,  before  I  was  three  years  old. 

This  admirable  lady  tried  to  teach  the  children 
of  the  next  generation  their  letters. 

And  here  I  may  as  well  illustrate  the  scenery 
and  the  other  arrangements  of  the  stage  in  Bos 
ton  in  the  twenties  by  telling  how  "  we  four " 
went  to  school  and  how  we  returned.  To  the 
company  of  readers  of  these  lines  who  live  within 
a  mile  or  two  of  the  cheerful  gaslight  by  which 
they  are  written,  the  locality  and  the  line  of 
march  will  be  sufficiently  clear  when  I  say  that 
I  was  born  in  a  house  of  which  the  front  door 
opened  where  the  Ladies'  Entrance  of  Parker's 


266        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 


Hotel  opens  to-day  —  near  School  Street  in 
Tremont  Street.  From  this  front  door,  Fullum, 
who  has  been  spoken  of  before,  took  us  to  school 
twice  a  day,  excepting  Thursdays  and  Saturdays, 

when  we  went  but 
once.  "  Us  "  means 
that  he  took  "us 
four  "  —  my  two 
sisters,  my  brother, 
and  me.  The  other 
three  were  my  play 
mates  ;  they  were 
older  than  I ;  and 
when  they  went  to 
school  daily,  I  used, 
naturally  enough, 
to  cry  and  beg  to 
go  with  them.  Ah 
me !  since  that  time 
I  have  known  many 
another  hapless 
child  who  has  stumbled  into  the  like  pitfall. 
Miss  Susan  Whitney  did  not  hesitate  to  receive 
me.  I  suppose  I  was  one  of  the  youngest  of  her 
flock.  She  attended  to  her  part  of  the  business 
well.  I  suppose  I  had  learned  my  letters  at 
home.  I  have  no  recollection  of  anything  in  the 


ABEL  FULLUM. 
Drawn  by  Ellen  D.  Hale. 


CHILD   LIFE   IN   BOSTON  267 

process.  I  cannot  recollect  any  moment  of  my 
life  when  I  could  not  read  as  well  as  I  can  now. 

I  may  say,  in  passing,  that  Sequoyah,  the  Chero 
kee  Cadmus,  taught  a  boy  to  read  in  a  day,  and 
speaks  as  if  two  or  three  days  were  always  quite 
sufficient  for  the  business.  Helen  Keller,  who 
was  certainly  badly  handicapped,  learned  to  read 
and  write  and  spell  in  less  than  four  months ; 
and  has  never,  I  think,  made  a  mistake  in  spell 
ing  in  twelve  years  since.  The  truth  seems  to 
be  that  we  generally  make  a  great  deal  too  much 
fuss  about  learning  to  read. 

What  I  remember  is  this :  that  the  school 
room  was  one  of  two  chambers  on  the  first  floor 
of  a  pre-Revolutionary  house  in  a  little  private 
courtyard  next  west  of  the  Trinity  Church  of 
those  days.  The  room  was  perhaps  fifteen  feet 
square,  with  a  sanded  floor,  and  with  benches 
and  chairs  enough  for  twenty  scholars  or  more. 
It  was  warmed  by  an  open  wood  fire  in  the  win 
ter.  We  had  slates  and  pencils  and  the  "  New 
York  Primer"  and  Barbauld's  "  Early  Lessons." 

It  seems  to  me  a  rather  curious  index  of  the 
times  that,  as  I  suppose,  there  was  no  other 
primer  in  Boston  since  the  "  New  England 
Primer,"  which  was  then  wholly  antiquated.  I 
had  some  highly  philosophical  child's  books,  not 


268 


MEMORIES    OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 


either  of  these  primers,  which  I  cannot  now  find. 
I  wish  any  one  would  tell  me  when  and  where  it 
was  arranged.  Some  such  book  which  I  had  gave 
me  a  picture  or  conspectus  of  the  five  vowels, 


afffiffiflfflfhfffiffiflftfkfb 


ABODEFGHI 
J X  L M  SOPQ 

C'T  I  I  \7  \A/  V 

5  1    U   V   W  X 


fht 


1  C    '      •  lu 

a  e  i  g  p 


Oo  Pp  $^q  Rr  SftTl 
Yv    Ww    Xx    Ty'  Zz 


ltalu 


n  o 


p 


a  e  i  o  u  y 


u  v 


be  dig  h  j  k  J  m  npqrf  stvwxz 


CE 


THE  NEW  ENGLAND  PRIMER. 
From  the  collection  of  W.  G.  Bowdoin,  Esq. 

each  leading  his  own  platoon  in  the  little  army. 
A  and  E  each  had  three  followers.  I,  0,  and  U, 
the  other  three  captains,  each  had  five.  Now 
whoever  always  sees  his  letters  arranged  in  this 
order  in  his  mind's  cabinet  has  many  great 
advantages  over  those  who  do  not  —  advantages 
which  it  is  not  necessary  here  to  describe. 


CHILD   LIFE    IN   BOSTON  269 

Let  us  return  to  Fullum  and  his  little  flock  of 
four,  of  the  united  ages,  as  the  newspapers  say,  of 
twenty-three  years.  Nathan  and  Sarah,  aged 
eight  and  seven,  could  have  gone  to  school  alone> 
bat  could  hardly  have  taken  care  of  me  and  my 
other  sister  at  the  ages  of  three  and  five.  We 
were  to  go  down  School  Street  —  then  a  paved 
lane  without  any  regular  curbstone  or  sidewalk 
—  to  turn  to  our  right  and  go  through  the  "  Main 
Street,"  not  yet  familiarly  called  Washington 
Street.  When  we  came  to  Sumner's  crockery- 
shop,  then  at  the  corner  of  Summer  Street,  with 
its  fascinating  shepherdesses  and  lambs  in  the 
window,  we  would  stop  a  moment  to  admire 
them,  and  then,  to  make  up  for  the  lost  time, 
would  hurry  down  to  the  courtyard  which  led  in 
to  Miss  Whitney's  door.  There  Fullum  took  us 
upstairs  and  left  us  in  the  northern  room ;  the 
southern  room  was  occupied  by  another  school 
under  the  care  of  Miss  Ayres.  There  was  a 
vague  impression  that  their  scholarship  was  more 
advanced  than  ours.  For  all  that,  however,  we 
had  the  serene  and  proper  childish  confidence 
that  ours  was  the  best  school  in  the  world,  and 
that  we,  as  individuals,  probably  had  no  superiors. 
The  only  blemish  on  this  bright  mirror  of  self- 
consciousness  was  the  fact  that  Miss  Ayres  had  a 


270        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

watch,  and  that  in  our  establishment  we  had  none. 
So  we  had  to  send  in  to  her  if  we  needed  to  know 
the  time. 

At  twelve  o'clock  Fullum  came  for  us  and  we 
went  home.  At  three  in  the  afternoon  we  went 
through  the  same  streets  again,  and  at  five 
went  back  again.  Joy  for  us  when  winter  came  ! 
For  the  purposes  of  winter,  Fullum  had  contrived 
a  box  sled,  which  was  painted  green.  Into  this 
box  sled  all  four  were  packed,  and  thus  we  en 
joyed,  on  the  snow,  four  triumphant  sleigh-rides 
daily,  dragged  by  our  faithful  friend.  How 
many  policemen  would  there  need  to  be  to  escort 
such  a  company  through  that  part  of  Washing 
ton  Street  to-day  ? 

Opposite  the  block  of  houses  of  which  ours  was 
one  were  three  large  gardens  running  up  to  the 
western  side  of  the  western  block  of  Treniont 
Place  of  to-day.  These  estates  were  bought  by 
the  syndicate  which  built  the  Tremont  House  and 
opened  Tremont  Place.  For  the  Tremont  House 
the  old  houses  were  taken  away  and  their 
orchards  were  cut  down.  The  corner-stone  of 
the  Tremont  House  was  laid  in  1828.  It  was 
matter  of  surprise  and  of  common  conversation 
that  here  was  to  be  a  large  hotel  which  had 
no  stable  of  its  own,  though  larger  than  the 


THE  PEOPLE  AT  THE  HELM 


271 


Indian's  Head  in  the  neighborhood.  Observe 
that  for  years  afterward  horses  and  oxen  gave 
the  only  motive  power  on  the  roads. 

THE   PEOPLE   AT   THE   HELM 

In  the  year  1830  I  saw  General  Jackson,  who 
had  come  to  Boston  as  President.  In  a  State 
which  had  voted 
stiffly  against  him, 
the  "  Progress  "  was 
watched  with  great 
interest.  Since  that 
time  I  have  spoken 
with  John  Quincy 
Adams,  with  Tyler, 
Polk,  Lincoln,  Grant, 
Garfield  I  think,  Ar 
thur,  Hayes,  Benjamin 
Harrison,  McKinley, 
and  Roosevelt.  I  have 
seen  all  the  Presidents 
since  Monroe.  From  Washington  to  Monroe,  I 
never  saw  any  of  the  five. 

It  was  on  the  third  day  of  November  in  1828 
that  I,  who  was  then  six  years  old,  was  led  by 
the  hand  of  Fullum  as  we  four  of  us  children 
returned,  after  dark,  from  a  tea-party  at  Katha- 


GENERAL  ANDREW  JACKSOX. 
From  a  rare  print  by  F.  Cardon. 


272 


MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 


rine  Foster's  in  Avon  Place.  It  was  the  night 
following  the  day  when  Massachusetts  had 
given  her  vote  for  J.  Q.  Adams  in  1828.  As 
Fullum  half  dragged  me  and  half  lifted  me 
across  the  "  Main  Street,"  a  man's  voice  broke 


THE  HERMITAGE. 

the  silence  of  the  evening  by  the  cry,  "  Hurrah 
for  Jackson ! "  I  think  that  such  cries  were 
then  very  unusual.  I  doubt  whether  the  New 
Englanders  were  in  the  habit  of  expressing 
themselves  in  such  ways.  A  counter  cry  from 
another  direction  immediately  replied,  "  Hurrah 
for  Adams!"  But,  alas!  a  third  voice,  evi 
dently  from  a  new  interlocutor,  replied  at  once 


THE    PEOPLE    AT    THE    HELM  273 

with  a  second  "  Hurrah  for  Jackson  !  "  I  was 
but  a  child,  but  in  one  matter  I  saw  the  future 
of  seventy  years  as  well  as  I  now  see  it  in  retro 
spect.  Impossible  not  to  observe  that  two  men 
hurrahed  for  Jackson  and  only  one  for  Adams  ! 
Impossible  not  to  reflect  that  in  the  street 
neither  my  father,  nor  my  uncles,  nor  any  of 
the  gentlemen  whom  I  was  used  to  see,  would 
have  hurrahed  for  anybody.  And,  at  the  same 
time,  how  clear,  even  to  a  child's  observation, 
that  there  were  many  more  men  in  the  world  of 
the  kind  who  like  to  hurrah  in  the  street  than 
of  the  kind  who  do  not  like  to !  All  that  we 
children  understood  of  the  business  was  that 
General  Jackson  once  hanged  six  militia-men, 
and  that  his  election  would  be  ruin  for  the 
country.  Observe  also  that  this  was  at  the  close 
of  an  election  day  in  which  Adams  had  four  votes 
in  Massachusetts  for  one  given  for  Jackson. 

I  believe  this  story  about  "  Hurrah  for  Jack 
son  !  "  is  worth  the  precious  three  hundred  words 
which  it  has  cost,  because  it  marks  almost  to  a 
minute  the  period  when  the  United  States  be 
came  a  real  democracy.  It  is  as  good  a  text  as 
I  shall  have  for  saying  a  few  words  on  the 
political  change  between  the  first  third  of  the 
century  and  the  last  two-thirds. 


VOL.  I.  T 


274        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

The  men  who  made  the  State  constitutions 
and  the  United  States  Constitution  had  no  idea 
of  the  universal  suffrage  with  which  we  are 
familiar.  Massachusetts  was  as  far  advanced 
in  such  matters  as  any  of  the  States,  but  Massa 
chusetts  had  begun  with  confiding  the  suffrage 
to  church  members,  and  they  were  only  admitted 
to  vote  by  the  consent  of  a  majority  of  those 
already  voters.  In  1780,  in  the  State  constitu 
tion  of  which  John  Adams  is  the  real  author, 
Massachusetts  gave  the  suffrage  to  landowners, 
or  to  persons  with  an  amount  of  property  on 
which  they  paid  taxes. 

By  the  National  Act  of  1798,  no  foreign  emi 
grant  could  be  received  to  suffrage  on  less  than 
fourteen  years'  probation,  and  this  after  five 
years'  previous  declaration  of  intention  to  be 
come  a  citizen. 

One  can  see  how  effective  were  the  limitations 
by  the  small  number  of  votes  as  compared  with 
the  whole  population.  It  was  like  a  vote  in 
Mississippi  to-day,  where  six  thousand  voters 
choose  the  Congressman  of  two  hundred  thou 
sand  people. 

What  followed  on  this  limitation  of  suffrage 
was  that  the  two  great  parties  were  simply  two 
rival  aristocracies,  There  is  something  ludicrous 


THE  PEOPLE  AT  THE  HELM      275 

now  in  reading  the  private  letters  of  the  real 
leaders  on  both  sides.  They  take  it  as  entirely 
for  granted  each  that  the  party  will  do  what 
half  a  dozen  leaders  determine  on ;  as  Mr. 
Croker  (in  1900)  took  it  for  granted  that  Tam 
many  would  do  what  he  determined  on.  Indeed, 
there  was  no  popular  convention  or  any  other 
method  by  which  the  rank  and  file  of  the  voters 
could  express  any  opinion,  even  if  they  had  one. 
But,  practically,  they  had  none.  The  condition 
of  affairs  in  South  Carolina  up  to  Mr.  Tillman's 
reign  is  a  good  enough  illustration  of  the  way  in 
which  every  State  was  managed  up  till  1829. 
"  Some  of  us  get  together  at  Columbia  after  the 
Commencement  and  arrange  the  politics  of  the 
State  for  the  next  year."  Such  was  the  con 
venient  fashion  everywhere  in  which  things  were 
managed  all  along  the  line,  before  people  found 
out  what  universal  suffrage  means  or  what 
democratic  government  is. 

It  seems  to  me  one  of  the  most  curious  bits  of 
political  sagacity  in  our  history  that,  as  early  as 
1815,  Aaron  Burr  suggested  the  name  of  An 
drew  Jackson  as  the  best  candidate  for  the  suc 
cession  to  James  Madison. 

Aaron  Burr  hated  and  despised  Monroe  as  he 
had  ever  since  they  quarrelled  in  the  Revolution. 


276         MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

And  so  Burr,  looking  with  the  dispassionate  eye 
of  one  who  wished  for  the  failure  of  both  of  the 
regular  candidates,  writes  :  — 

"The  moment  is  extremely  auspicious  for 
breaking  down  this  degrading  system.  The  best 
citizens  of  our  country  acknowledge  the  feeble 
ness  of  our  administration.  They  acknowledge 
that  offices  are  bestowed  merely  to  preserve 
power,  and  without  the  smallest  regard  to  fit 
ness.  If,  then,  there  be  a  man  in  the  United 
States  of  firmness  and  decision,  and  having 
standing  enough  to  afford  even  a  hope  of  suc 
cess,  it  is  your  duty  to  hold  him  up  to  public 
view :  that  man  is  Andrew  Jackson.  Nothing 
is  wanting  but  a  respectable  nomination,  made 
before  the  proclamation  of  the  Virginia  caucus, 
and  Jackson's  success  is  inevitable." 

When,  twenty  years  later,  the  New  York 
regency  at  Albany  sent  the  younger  Hamilton  to 
open  negotiations  with  Andrew  Jackson,  they 
thought,  in  the  innocence  of  their  hearts,  that 
they  created  him  and  they  were  going  to  run 
him.  As  a  chess-player  moves  a  pawn  and 
changes  it  into  a  queen  and  then  moves  the 
queen  up  and  down  the  board  as  he  chooses,  so 
the  managers  at  Albany  thought  they  were  go 
ing  to  handle  this  Western  bush-whacker.  In 


THE   PEOPLE   AT   THE   HELM  277 

1853  the  Southern  Democratic  leaders  tried  the 
same  experiment  with  Franklin  Pierce,  and  with 
entire  success. 

But  Andrew  Jackson,  when  he  was  called  into 
being,  proved  to  be  made  of  very  different  stuff. 
He  was  neither  putty  nor  dough.  He  said  very 
squarely  that  the  American  people  made  him 
President,  and  that  he  had  nobody  to  thank,  and 
nobody  to  reward,  and  nobody  to  obey.  It  is  a 
pawn  who  rules  the  board,  if  you  please,  but  he 
rules  it  in  his  own  way,  and  not  as  any  Albany 
regency  or  any  John  Caldwell  Calhoun  bids  him 
rule  it. 

That  man  is  a  strong  man  who  has  the  Ameri 
can  people  behind  him.  Lincoln  said  wisely  that 
you  can  fool  some  of  them  some  of  the  time,  but 
that  no  man  ever  fooled  all  of  them  all  the  time. 
The  eight  years  of  Andrew  Jackson's  dynasty 
were  the  end  of  the  halting  pretence  at  republi 
canism  of  the  first  fifty  years  of  the  Constitu 
tion.  From  that  time  down  the  men  who  had 
the  Nation  behind  them  have  succeeded.  The 
men  who  were  set  up  by  intriguing  oligarchies 
have  failed. 

Up  till  the  close  of  General  Jackson's  Presi 
dency,  as  I  have  said,  no  such  thing  was  heard 
of  as  a  National  Convention  for  the  choice  of  a 


278        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

candidate.  Somebody  had  to  make  such,  a 
choice ;  and,  for  want  of  a  better,  a  meeting  of 
the  members  of  Congress  named,  the  candidates 
of  either  party.  So  it  was  that  in  1825  General 
Jackson  and  John  Quiricy  Adams  and  Mr.  Craw 
ford  and  Mr.  Clay  divided  the  electoral  votes. 
But  so  soon  as  General  Jackson  withdrew,  hav 
ing  named  Mr.  Van  Buren  as  his  successor,  all 
the  enthusiasm  of  the  Democratic  party  departed 
with  Old  Hickory.  Poor  Van  Buren  had  to  face 
the  terrible  storm  of  the  commercial  crisis  of 
1837.  The  fault  was  none  of  his,  excepting  as 
the  industrial  States  of  America  are  always  at 
fault  when  they  intrust  their  business  to  those 
States  where  nobody  can  mend  a  water-pail,  or 
to  statesmen  who  do  not  know  a  bill  of  lading 
from  a  bill  of  exchange,  —  to  men  who  "  know 
nothing  of  trade,"  as  that  excellent  Monroe  said. 
In  the  crisis  of  1837  half  the  business  firms  in 
the  country  were  bankrupt  and  half  its  indus 
tries  were  destroyed,  of  which  the  consequence 
was  that  the  industrial  States,  that  is,  New 
England,  the  West,  and  the  great  States 
between,  took  their  affairs  for  once  into  their 
own  hands. 

When  they  called  together  the  great  conven 
tions  of  1839  and  1840,  the  reign  of  oligarchies 


THE    PEOPLE   AT    THE   HELM  279 

and  caucuses  of  Congressmen  was  over,  and  the 
reign  of  the  voters  began. 

In  the  very  bitter  canvasses,  all  crowded  with 
personalities,  which  preceded  the  election  of 
John  Quincy  Adams  and  of  Andrew  Jackson, 
every  sort  of  lie  was  told  on  all  sides.  In  those 
circles  of  the  New  England  States  which  prided 
themselves  on  civilization  no  tales  were  told 
with  more  eagerness  than  those  which  presumed 
that  a  Tennessee  man  must  be  wholly  barbarian, 
so  far  as  the  etiquettes  of  elegant  life  would  go. 
But  when  Andrew  Jackson  came  to  the  White 
House  the  curiosity  of  the  country  was  perhaps 
a  little  annoyed  that  the  so-called  elegancies  of 
Washington  were  maintained.  He  did  not  go 
out  with  a  shot-gun  to  bring  in  canvas-back 
ducks  from  the  river,  and  Mrs.  Jackson  did  not 
dress  them  at  an  open  fire. 

Still,  I  remember  very  well  the  anecdote  in 
which  Mrs.  Jackson  was  supposed  to  give  an 
account  of  a  lung  fever,  of  which,  I  think,  she 
died.  It  was  declared  and  believed  in  Northern 
circles  that  she  said,  "  The  Gineral  kicked  the 
kiverlet  off,  and  I  kotched  cold."  I  should  not 
tell  the  story  but  to  record  the  resentment  of  a 
true  lady,  a  relative  of  my  own,  who  had  seen 
all  the  elegancies  of  the  best  Courts  of  Europe, 


280        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

and  who  protested  to  me  that  Mrs.  Jackson  was 
a  lady  through  and  through,  in  breeding  as  in 
daily  manners.  My  friend  quoted  the  anecdote 
which  I  have  told,  only  as  illustration  of  the  bit 
terness  of  partisanship  at  that  time.  On  the 
other  hand,  if  any  story  can  be  received  at  the 
distance  of  one  person  from  the  spot  of  which 
the  story  is  told,  the  story  which  I  will  now 
record  is  true  :  — 

The  daughter  of  a  Massachusetts  Senator  told 
me  that  in  her  younger  life  she  went  with  her 
father  to  one  of  the  regulation  dinners  at  the 
White  House.  General  Jackson  himself  took 
her  out  to  the  dinner- table.  There  was  some 
talk  about  the  light  of  the  table,  and  the  General 
said  to  her,  "  The  chanticleer  does  not  burn 
well."  She  was  so  determined  that  she  should 
not  misunderstand  him  that  she  pretended  not 
to  hear  him  and  asked  him  what  he  said.  To 
which  his  distinct  reply  was,  "  The  chanticleer 
does  not  burn  well." 

MARTIN  VAN   BUREN 

Of  Mr.  Van  Buren  the  general  impression  is 
certainly  that  he  was  simply  an  intriguing  New 
York  politician,  utterly  indifferent  to  anything 
but  his  own  advancement  and  the  success  of  his 


MARTIN   VAN   BUREN  281 

own  coterie  in  the  politics  of  New  York.  But 
as  lately  as  March,  1891,  I  heard  Mr.  McKinley 
express  a  very  different  opinion.  I  should  not 
repeat  what  he  said  if  he  were  living ;  but  his 
remark  has  for  me  a  special  interest  because, 


MARTIN  VAN  BUREN. 
After  a  miniature  by  Mrs.  Bogardus. 

after  that  evening,  I  never  saw  him  again,  and 
these  were  among  the  last  words  I  ever  heard 
him  utter. 

In  his  charming,  cordial  way  Mr.  McKinley 
was  showing  to  Mrs.  Hale  the  arrangements  of 


282         MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

the  White  House.  As  we  passed  a  rather  poor 
full-length  portrait  of  Van  Buren,  he  took  a 
candle,  by  which  he  could  throw  a  better  light 
on  the  face,  and  called  our  special  attention  to 
it.  He  said  that  till  lately  he  had  grown  up  in 
the  feeling  to  which  most  of  us  were  trained  in 
younger  days,  that  Van  Buren  was  a  man  of  no 
wide  range  of  thought,  or  indeed  of  any  con 
victions  ;  that  he  was  merely  a  selfish  politician. 
But  lately  he  had  been  studying  those  early  days 
with  new  interest,  and  he  was  convinced  that 
Van  Buren  was  a  much  stronger  man  —  a  man 
far  more  fit  for  the  Presidency  —  than  history 
has  on  the  whole  believed.  I  suppose  he  had 
been  reading  Mr.  Shepard's  thorough  and  val 
uable  study. 

If  anybody  chooses  to  say  that  Martin  Van 
Buren  made  Andrew  Jackson  President  of  the 
United  States,  I  think  he  can  maintain  his  thesis. 
Certainly  the  man  who  did  that  did  something 
of  importance  in  history. 

In  the  election  of  1824  Jackson  had  enough 
Western  votes  to  bring  him  as  a  prominent 
candidate  before  the  people  in  1828.  The  New 
York  leaders  did  not  care  who  was  President,  if 
only  they  had  "the  patronage,"  and  they  seem 
to  have  thought  that  in  this  popular  old  General, 


MARTIN   VAN   BUREN  283 

then  more  than  sixty  years  old,  they  should  find 
a  tool  whom  they  could  handle  easily.  So  they 
sent  the  younger  Hamilton  all  the  way  to  the 
"  Hermitage/'  as  the  old  General  called  his  home 
in  Tennessee,  to  sound  him,  virtually  to  offer 
him  the  nomination,  if  he  would  agree  to  their 
conditions.  Hamilton's  journey  was  somewhat 
like  what  the  journey  of  a  young  New  Yorker 
of  the  Four  Hundred  would  be  to-day  if  he  were 
sent,  say,  into  the  "  Bad  Lands "  to  have  an 
interview  with  a  Blackfoot  chief.  He  afterward 
printed  his  instructions,  which  are  very  funny. 
He  was  to  observe  the  habits  of  the  family,  and 
to  be  able  to  tell  such  things  as  might  be  profit 
able  in  the  canvass  —  whether  they  had  family 
prayers,  whether  the  old  gentleman  asked  a 
blessing  at  table,  whether  they  played  cards,  etc. 
Let  the  reader  remember  that  one  of  the  reasons 
why  John  Quincy  Adams  was  not  reflected  was 
that  he  had  a  billiard-table  in  the  White  House. 
But  when  the  New  York  managers  had  caught 
their  hare  and  had  him  in  the  White  House,  they 
found,  as  I  have  said  —  rather  to  their  dismay  — 
that  they  could  not  manage  him  "  worth  a  cent," 
to  use  a  fine  National  proverb.  The  General 
had  a  very  decided  will  of  his  own.  He  had 
the  knack  of  cutting  Gordian  knots,  and  came 


284         MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

to  like  it.  Possibly  to  get  Van  Buren  out  of  his 
way,  he  sent  him  as  his  Minister  to  England, —  an 
official  appointment  which  meant  even  more  then 
than  it  would  now. 

Mr.  Parton  says — and  I  think  wisely — that 
if  the  United  States  Senate  had  only  had  sense 
enough  to  leave  Mr.  Van  Buren  in  London,  and, 
one  might  add,  to  thank  God  he  was  there,  the 
history  of  this  country  since  would  have  been 
different.  But  there  was  a  strong  opposition 
Senate.  Mr.  Webster  and  Mr.  Clay  were  leading 
it,  and,  in  the  pride  of  power,  they  refused  to 
confirm  the  nomination  of  Mr.  Van  Buren  after 
he  had  been  presented  at  the  English  Court  in 
1831.  He  had  the  mortification  of  presenting 
his  own  recall,  and  the  English  Foreign  Minister 
—  either  Earl  Dudley  or  Lord  Palmerston  —  said 
to  him,  what  is  very  true,  that,  to  a  public  man, 
an  act  of  evident  injustice  is  often  one  of  great 
advantage. 

Certainly  it  proved  so  to  Van  Buren.  The 
rejection  by  the  Senate  made  him  President. 
The  insult  had  been  aimed,  not  at  him,  but  at 
General  Jackson,  and  Old  Hickory  understood 
this  perfectly  well.  From  the  moment  of  Van 
Buren's  return  he  folded  him  in  his  arms  and 
made  his  interest  his  first  care.  Will  it  do  to 


MARTIN   VAN   BUREN  285 

say  he  made  his  election  sure  ?  On  Jackson's 
nomination,  Van  Buren  was  made  Vice-President 
for  the  second  term  of  Old  Hickory,  and  so  far 
all  the  new  popularity  which  Jackson  had  won 
as  the  saviour  of  the  Union  went  to  the  account 
of  Van  Buren. 

But  he  could  not  have  the  popularity  without 
the  responsibility.  Whether  he  himself  cared 
for  the  sub-treasury  system  or  for  the  rest  of 
General  Jackson's  financial  policy,  he  had  to 
take  the  consequences  of  that  policy.  The 
financial  panic  of  1837  swept  over  the  country. 
Literally  everybody  suffered.  Practically  every 
body  charged  it  on  the  Government.  A  storm 
of  indignation  swept  out  the  President  who  had 
had  two-thirds  of  the  electoral  votes  in  1836. 

I  heard  a  little  story,  when  I  was  in  Washing 
ton  four  years  after  this  downfall,  which  illus 
trates  the  bitterness  with  which  the  people  of 
his  own  State  regarded  him.  Things  were  very 
simple  in  Washington  in  1836.  Manners  had 
the  simplicity  which  they  would  have  in  a  large 
country  town  in  Virginia  or  Kentucky  to-day. 
So  it  happened  that  of  an  evening,  probably 
when  Congress  was  not  in  session,  the  President 
would  walk  across  to  Lafayette  Square  and  make 
an  evening  call  in  one  of  the  charming  homes 


286         MEMOEIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

there.  The  people  there  were  glad  to  have  him 
entertain  himself  as  he  would,  and  such  home 
like  visits  were  often  repeated.  But  as  the  "  re 
cess,"  as  people  used  to  call  it,  went  on,  Mr.  Van 
Buren's  visits  at  Mr.  Ogle  Tayloe's  suddenly 
stopped.  Mrs.  Tayloe,  herself  a  most  agreeable 
lady  from  an  old  Albany  family,  told  her  hus 
band  that  he  must  go  over  to  the  White  House 
and  ask  Mr.  Van  Buren  why  he  had  given  up 
his  evening  calls,  and  Mr.  Tayloe  undertook  the 
commission. 

Mr.  Van  Buren  did  not  hesitate  in  reply.  He 
said  that  it  was  true  that  he  had  given  up  his 
visits  to  Mrs.  Tayloe:  "She  has  things  lying 
about  on  her  table  which  should  not  be  there." 

Then  it  proved  that,  as  a  part  of  the  drawing- 
room  furniture,  Mrs.  Tayloe's  matchless  collec 
tions  of  autographs  lay  on  the  table.  It  was 
specially  rich  in  letters  from  New  York  states 
men  —  letters  from  many  men  whom  the  whole 
world  remembers.  The  President  had  been  fond 
of  turning  these  books  over.  They  revealed  to 
him  some  things  which  he  had  not  known  before. 

Mr.  Tayloe  went  back  to  his  wife  with  the 
President's  message,  and  they  applied  themselves 
to  studying  the  autograph-books.  It  was  not 
long  before  this  phrase  was  disinterred  :  "  What 


MARTIN   VAN    BUREN  287 

is  little  Matty  doing  ?  Some  dirty  work,  of 
course,  as  usual."  To  this  phrase,  not  unnatu 
rally,  the  President  had  taken  exception.  Mrs. 
Tayloe's  scissors  at  once  relieved  the  book,  and 
so  she  wrote  to  Mr.  Van  Buren.  And  the  Presi 
dent  of  the  United  States  was  able  to  renew  his 
visits  upon  his  opposite  neighbor. 

It  is  difficult  for  an  outsider  to  understand 
•  how  completely  the  President  of  the  United 
States  is  sometimes  shut  in  out  of  sight,  almost 
out  of  sound,  of  the  very  people  who  have  chosen 
him.  In  November,  1840,  as  I  have  said  just 
now,  by  a  perfect  typhoon  of  indignation  on  the 
part  of  the  commercial  and  manufacturing 
States  and  of  the  West,  then  new  to  power, 
Mr.  Van  Buren  was  swept  out  of  office  and 
old  General  Harrison  was  put  in.  Harrison 
had  234  electoral  votes  and  Van  Buren  had 
only  60.  The  election  had  already  begun,  it  had 
been  decided  in  some  States,  when  Mr.  Alexan 
der  Everett,  who  told  me  this  story,  passing 
through  Washington,  made  a  visit  on  Mr.  Van 
Buren.  Mr.  Van  Buren  assured  him,  and  be 
lieved  that  evening,  that  he  should  be  reelected, 
and  reelected  by  a  strong  majority.  The  mana 
gers  of  the  White  House,  if  one  may  say  so,  the 
people  who  kept  the  President,  had  succeeded  in 


288         MEMORIES    OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

deceiving  so  far  the  man  whom  posterity  has  re 
garded  as  the  most  astute  politician  of  his  time. 
Mr.  Everett,  when  he  told  me  the  story,  was 
confident  that  this  was  not  the  talk  of  an  in 
triguer  to  an  outsider,  but  that  Mr.  Van  Buren 
expressed  his  own  opinion  as  to  the  issue. 


INTERNAL   IMPROVEMENT 


VOL -I.  —  U 


CHAPTER   VII 
INTERNAL   IMPROVEMENT 

IN  an  earlier  chapter  I  told  a  story  of  the 
way  in  which  the  Connecticut  River  stu 
dents  of  Williams  College  travelled  fifty  miles 
to  and  from  their  homes.  In  1902  a  student 
can  go  from  Northampton  to  Williamstown  in 
less  than  two  hours.  My  father,  in  1806, 
went  from  the  same  Northampton  to  Boston  by 
what  was  called  "the  stage"  on  a  journey 
which  he  supposed  would  take  two  days.  In 
fact,  it  took  three.  He  began  by  taking  the 
public  conveyance  from  Northampton  to  .  Brook- 
field,  a  ride,  perhaps,  of  thirty-five  miles.  At 
Brookfield  this  line  connected  with  the  stage 
line  from  Springfield  to  Boston.  He  had  taken 
a  through  passage,  or,  as  our  English  friends 
would  say,  was  "  booked  through,"  so  that  he 
was  sure  of  a  seat  in  the  carriage  from  Spring 
field  when  it  came  along.  While  they  waited 
at  Brookfield,  a  lady  appeared  who  was  very 
unxious  to  go  to  Boston  as  soon  as  possible. 

291 


292         MEMORIES    OF   A   HUNDRED    YEARS 

But  when  the  Springfield  wagon  appeared,  there 
was  no  seat  for  her,  the  six  seats  being  all  taken. 
With  all  his  own  kindness  of  heart,  my  father 
gave  up  his  seat  to  her,  spent  twenty-four  hours 
with  a  classmate,  and  went  on  to  Boston  the 
next  day.  When,  afterward,  he  built  the  Bos 
ton  and  Worcester  Railroad  and  directed  the 


A  VIEW  OF  BOSTON,  SHOWING  THE  PROVIDENCE  AND  THE 
WORCESTER   RAILWAYS. 
From  an  early  drawing. 

preliminary  surveys  for  the  Boston  and  Albany 
roads,  which  now  carry  thousands  of  passen 
gers  daily  between  Boston  and  the  Connecti 
cut  River,  he  liked  to  tell  this  story  of  his 
three  days  from  the  Connecticut  River  to  his 
future  home.  I  have  already  told  the  family 
story  of  his  voyage  from  New  York  to  Troy, 
which  required  twelve  days. 


INTERNAL    IMPROVEMENT  293 

When  one  compares  such  anecdotes,  which  for 
time  and  distance  are  on  the  scale  of  Sindbad's 
voyages,  against  the  incidents  of  our  daily  lives, 
he  gets  some  feeling  of  the  contrast,  almost  ab 
surd,  between  the  beginning  of  the  century  and 
the  end.  The  steps  of  advance  can  be  marked 
quite  distinctly.  And  I  should  think  that  one 
of  the  wide-awake  young  men  who  are  con 
nected  with  the  more  than  gigantic  railway 
system  of  the  country  would  find  it  worth  rn's 
while  to  give  to  us  a  thorough  history  of  the 
progress  in  this  business  of  going  from  place  to 
place.  A  hundred  years  have  changed  almost 
every  detail  of  almost  every  life  in  America  by 
the  changes  wrought  in  travel.  Mr.  Charles 
Francis  Adams,  the  second  of  that  illustrious 
name,  has  made  some  interesting  studies  in 
that  line.  Perhaps  he  will  build  on  his  own 
foundations. 

It  shows  what  manner  of  man  Washington 
was  that,  in  the  literature  of  the  subject,  what 
he  wrote  about  the  importance  of  opening  up 
the  West,  and  of  the  details  of  method  as  well, 
is  more  in  amount  than  everything  on  record 
said  by  all  his  contemporaries  in  the  same 
years.  It  really  seems  as  if  Washington  were 
the  only  person  in  the  country  who  even  be- 


294        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

gan  to  comprehend  its  future.  After  the  Revo 
lution  his  diaries  are  full  of  the  journeys  which 
he  took,  even  as  far  as  the  valley  of  the  Ohio, 
and  they  often  dwell  on  this  great  business.  It 
was  a  matter  of  course  that  the  New  York 
people  should  see  those  natural  facilities  for 
reaching  the  lake  region  which  they  after 
ward  developed.  Every  soldier  in  every  army 
which  tramped  through  central  New  York,  as 
well  as  every  trader  who  brought  in  a  pack 
of  beaver,  told  the  same  story  of  a  country 
without  mountains,  easy  for  canals  or  other 
highways.  Travellers  do  not  perhaps  recol 
lect  generally  that,  until  a  period  which  does 
not  seem  very  long,  the  waters  of  the  West 
did  not  seek  the  valley  of  the  St.  Lawrence, 
but  crossed  to  what  we  call  the  Hudson 
River,  and  found  the  ocean  by  what  I  sup 
pose  I  must  call  the  Vanderbilt  route.  I  be 
lieve  the  geologists  think  this  was  not  ten 
thousand  years  ago.  I  suppose  that  till  the 
end  of  the  eighteenth  century,  however,  the 
Iroquois  Indians  seemed  an  important  and 
inconvenient  obstacle  in  the  way  of  roads  or 
canals  before  1800. 

Washington's  wishes  for  Virginia  turned  on 
the  improvement  of  the  navigation  of  the  James 


INTERNAL   IMPROVEMENT  295 

and  Potomac  Rivers.  There  is  on  record  a  con 
versation  of  his  in  the  latter  part  of  his  life  in 
which  he  foreshadowed  the  Erie  Canal.  For 
thirty  years  more,  far-sighted  people  were 
planning  and  building  canals  westward.  In 
New  York  these  people  were  led  by  De  Witt 
Clinton. 

This  canal  was  opened  in  1825,  and  has 
been  a  benefactor  to  millions  who  do  not 
know  enough  to  thank 
the  men  who  built  it. 
"Give  us  this  day  our 
daily  bread,"  this  is 
the  daily  prayer  of 
millions  upon  millions 
of  such  people.  Of 
which  millions,  let  us 
hope,  one  half  thank 
the  God  who  answers 
it.  But  I  am  afraid 
that  even  of  that  half,  not  one  child  of  his  in 
a  thousand  thanks  the  agents  of  the  good 
God  in  this  affair.  Yet  they  insisted  that  his 
children  through  the  world  watered  by  the 
Atlantic  should  buy  their  flour  for  four  dol 
lars  a  barrel,  as  they  do  to-day,  instead  of 
paying  sixteen  dollars,  as  their  ancestors  often 


296        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

did  before  De  Witt  Clinton  built  the  Erie 
Canal.1 

When  I  was  in  college,  the  Josiah  Quincy  of 
that  generation,  the  man  who  was  born  just  be 
fore  the  Revolutionary  Josiah  Quincy  died,  told 
me  something  about  the  cereal  food  of  Massachu 
setts  in  his  boyhood.  I  knew  perfectly  well  that 
his  family  was  in  as  comfortable  circumstances 
as  any  family  in  New  England.  He  said  that 
until  his  manhood  white  bread,  the  bread  made 
from  wheat  flour,  was,  so  to  speak,  a  luxury 
on  his  mother's  table.  I  remember  he  said  it 
was  served  as  nice  cake  might  be  served  in  the 
average  New  England  family  of  the  time  when 
we  were  speaking.  His  mother  would  have  her 
loaf  of  white  bread  in  the  house,  but  it  would  be 
used,  not  as  the  substantial  bread  of  the  family, 
but  as  a  sort  of  extra  luxury  at  the  table.  The 
family  food  was  "  rye  'n'  injun,"  as  we  Yankees 
say,  by  which  we  mean  the  bread  which  is  sold 
at  restaurants  as  Boston  brown  bread. 

So  much  interest  attached  to  the  subject  of 
canals  that  in  Rees's  great  quarto  Cyclopaedia, 
the  ancestor  of  the  great  cyclopaedias  of  to-day, 

ll  speak  of  rates  in  Boston.  In  Philadelphia,  in  the  heart 
of  what  was  then  a  wheat-growing  county,  the  highest  rates  for 
the  seventy  years  after  1784  was  $15.00  in  March,  1796. 


INTERNAL   IMPROVEMENT  297 

one  hundred  and  seventy-five  pages  are  given 
to  the  subject,  and  a  separate  account  is  given 
of  every  canal  in  the  British  Islands  at  the 
beginning  of  the  century.  The  American  editor 
introduces  a  long  and  careful  account  of  the 
canals  undertaken  in  the  United  States  from 


ILLUMINATION  OF  THE  NEW  YORK  CITY  HALL  DURING  THE  GRAND 
CANAL  CELEBRATION. 

the  time  when,  under  Franklin,  the  route  was 
surveyed  for  a  canal  across  New  Jersey.  This 
account  gives  the  history  of  American  canals 
up  to  1805  and  1806,  when  the  article  was 
prepared. 

On  the  4th  of  July,  1817,  the  first  spadeful 


298        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

of  earth  was  turned  for  the  Erie  Canal,  and  in 
October,  1825,  this  longest  canal  in  the  world 
was  open  for  traffic.  The  whole  construction 
is  an  admirable  object-lesson  in  the  study  of 
American  life  and  American  success.  Half  of 
the  men  who  built  it  had  never  seen  a  canal. 
Mr.  Fitzgerald  tells  a  story  of  a  young  New 
Yorker  who  had  to  do  with  it,  crossing  to 
Europe  for  the  purpose  of  seeing  European 
canals.  He  walked  on  the  tow-paths  of  those 
canals  and  came  home  with  the  results  of  his 
observations.  In  just  such  fashion  was  the 
whole  early  school  of  American  civil  engineers 
trained,  and  we  owe  it  to  the  country's  skill  in 
self-education  that  this  school  of  engineers  has 
achieved  the  methods  of  to-day. 

At  the  close  of  this  chapter  we  print  a  fac 
simile  of  a  note  of  De  Witt  Clinton's  in  1817, 
in  which  he  alludes  to  the  great  work  which 
has  given  immortality  to  his  name. 

The  Erie  and  Champlain  canals  were  built 
entirely  by  the  State  and  cost  only  ten  million 
dollars.  Before  1830  they  were  paying  an 
annual  income  of  more  than  eight  per  cent  to 
the  State,  and  it  was  already  estimated'  that 
the  canals  had  increased  the  value  of  the  real 
estate  of  New  York  by  a  hundred  million  dollars. 


INTERNAL   IMPROVEMENT  299 

Such  successes  are  conveniently  forgotten  to-day 
by  people  who,  while  eating  their  daily  bread, 
whine  about  the  dangers  which  accrue  to  a 
State  which  owns  it  own  highways. 

It  was  quite  natural  that  the  men  of  the 
future,  if  one  may  call  them  so,  'in  America, 
should  first  turn  their  attention  to  the  establish 
ment  of  navigable  canals.  The  General  Reader, 
though  he  is  a  person  who  knows  very  little,  still 
recollects  the  names  of  Stanhope  and  of  the 
Earl  of  Bridgewater  and  of  the  great  engineers 
of  those  times. 

In  point  of  time  the  Santee  Canal  of  South 
Carolina  is  earliest  of  the  American  series  of 
canals,  but  the  first  of  importance  which  actually 
got  to  work  was  the  Middlesex  Canal,  uniting  the 
Merrimack  River  of  the  northern  part  of  Mas 
sachusetts  with  Boston  Harbor.  In  1833  this 
canal  passed  into  the  ownership  of  the  com 
petitor  which  ran  near  it,  the  Boston  and 
Lowell  Railroad.  During  a  considerable  part 
of  its  existence  it  paid  dividends. 

The  charter  of  this  canal  was  signed  by  John 
Hancock  on  the  22d  of  June,  1793.  In  the  next 
October  the  directors  chose  James  Sullivan,  after 
ward  Governor,  to  be  their  President,  Loammi 
Baldwin  to  be  their  first  Vice-President,  and 


300        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 


John  Brooks,  afterward  Governor,  the  second 
Vice-President.  The  early  accounts  say  that  it 
was  difficult  to  collect  capital  stock,  but  eventu 
ally  five  hundred  thousand  dollars  was  sub 
scribed  for  this  purpose.  Mr.  Weston,  an  English 
engineer,  was  engaged  to  make  surveys,  and 

in  the  spring  of  1794 
the  work  began.  The 
canal  was  opened  in 
1803.  There  are  not 
many  persons  now 
living  who  have 
sailed  from  Boston 
to  Lowell  in  a  packet- 
boat  on  that  canal  ; 
but  for  me,  one  of 
my  earliest  memories 

JAMES    SULLIVAN.     PRESIDENT    OF      is  a  ™yage  for  a  day 

Up0n  ft,  jn  tne  Qeneral 
„  77  . 

buiiivan  packet-boat 
from  Charlestown,  opposite  Boston,  to  C  helms- 
ford.  At  Chelmsford  they  were  building  the 
dam  which  has  created  the  water-power  of  the 
city  of  Lowell.  My  father  was  interested  in 
such  work,  and  took  us  all  down  to  Chelmsford 
when  he  went  to  see  the  progress  of  the  dam. 
Lowell  was  incorporated  with  its  new  name 


THE  MIDDLESEX  CANAL  COMPANY. 
After  the  portrait  by  Gilbert  Stuart. 


INTERNAL    IMPROVEMENT  301 

the  next  year,  the  territory  being  taken  from 
the  old  territory  of  Chelmsford. 

I  am  told  that  for  many  years  no  salmon 
has  succeeded  in  flinging  himself  up  over  the 
dam.  But  in  that  early  day,  when  the  Falls 
had  the  picturesque  look  which  we  are  able  to 
reproduce  from  an  old  paint 
ing  by  an  English  artist,  the 
salmon  had  not  deserted  the 
homes  of  their  ancestors.  It 
was  a  familiar  tradition  that, 
on  one  of  those  excursions  of 
the  gentlemen  of  the  Lowell 
Company  to  Chelmsford,  Mr. 
Isaac  P.  Davis,1  one  of  the 

leaders    of    Boston,    Went    OUt  COLONEL  LOAMMI 

,  «       .,  BALDWIN. 

to     the     innkeeper     of     the  From  a  silhouette    The 
Chelmsford    Tavern    to    ask     only    known    portrait 

.  from  life. 

what   he    should    give    them 
for    dinner.     The    man    said    he   thought   they 
would  like  a  nice  salmon,  and  that  that  would 
be  the  resistance-piece  for  their  party. 

As  the  morning  went  on  Mr.  Davis  thought 
he  should  like  to  see  the  salmon,  and  went 

1  I  \vould  print  the  middle  name  at  length.  But  there  was 
no  middle  name.  Mr.  Davis  found  inconvenience  from  the  fact 
that  there  was  another  Isaac  Davis  in  Boston  and  he  inserted 
the  P  to  relieve  them  both  from  annoyance. 


302        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

out  to  ask  that  permission  could  be  given  him. 
To  which  the  reply  was :  "  You  don't  think  I 
am  such  a  fool  as  to  catch  him  before  we  want 
him  ?  He  is  in  the  pool,  and  will  not  go  up 


THE  FALLS  IN  THE  MERBIMACK  AT  CHELMSFORD. 
From  a  painting  by  an  English  artist. 

for  twenty-four  hours;  I  shall  go  out  before 
dinner  and  catch  him."  And  so  he  did ;  such 
were  the  simple  refrigerators  in  which  men 
kept  their  fish  in  those  early  days. 

The    enthusiasm   for   building    canals   which 


INTERNAL  IMPROVEMENT  303 

Washington  and  his  more  intelligent  contem 
poraries  had  attempted  to  awaken,  gradually 
extended  itself  and  became  almost  a  mania. 
The  cyclopaedias  and  reports  of  the  time  give 
the  names  of  such  enterprises  as  these,  which 
are  among  the  most  important.  All  of  them 
took  new  life  with  the  triumphant  success  of  the 
Erie  Canal  :  — 

The  Middlesex  Canal,  in  Massachusetts. 

The  system  of  Pennsylvania,  spoken  of  as  the 
largest  system  of  all;  but  the  Erie  Canal  was  the 
longest. 

The  Chesapeake  and  Ohio  Canal. 

The  Dismal  Swamp  Canal  of  Virginia,  which 
was  among  the  earliest  finished. 

The  large  system  in  Ohio,  and  in  other  States 
large  appropriations  for  the  improvement  of 
rivers. 

In  Maryland  the  Baltimore  and  Ohio  Railroad 
was  begun  in  July,  1828,  and  it  was  using  steam 
power  in  1831. 

The  reader  will  see  that  there  is  no  large 
enterprise  till  we  come  to  De  Witt  Clinton  and 
his  great  Erie  Canal.  Of  Burr's  two  families, 
which  divided,  as  he  says,  the  politics  of  New 
York,  the  Livingstons  gave  to  America  the 
steamboat  with  Fulton's  cooperation,  and  the 


304        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

Clintons  gave  to  America  the  Erie  Canal.  No 
work  or  word  of  Jefferson's  administration  is  to 
be  compared  with,  these,  excepting  the  Louisiana 
purchase,  the  credit  of  which,  as  has  been  said, 
belongs  to  Livingston  and  Napoleon. 

Traces  of  the  canal  epidemic  and  its  results 


THE  SUSQUEHANNA  AT  LIVERPOOL,  PA.,  SHOWING  THE  PENNSYLVANIA 

CANAL. 
A  comparison  of  the  two  modes  of  carrying  freight. 

may  still  be  seen  in  Ohio.  These  owe  their 
place  in  history,  however,  to  the  fact  that  John 
Quincy  Adams  crossed  Ohio  in  a  canal-boat ;  and 
that  the  Ohio  canals  find  a  place  in  Mr.  Ho  wells' s 
history  of  his  boyhood.  In  those  level  prairie 
States  of  the  Northwest  there  were  certain  possi 
bilities  for  such  enterprises.  The  attempt  of  the 


INTERNAL   IMPROVEMENT  305 

great  State  of  Pennsylvania  to  take  a  canal 
across  the  Alleghanies  seems  to  us  now  almost 
magnificent  in  its  blundering  audacity.  Possibly 
this  reader  may  live  to  see  how  our  poor  Penn 
sylvania,  or  rich  Pennsylvania,  had  to  pay  forty 
million  dollars  to  Sydney  Smith  and  others  who 
had  furnished  the  money  for  this  quixotic  en 
deavor.  New  Jersey  lent  herself  more  readily 
to  such  enterprises. 

But  if  Mr.  Eads's  successors  shall  give  us,  as 
they  think  they  can,  a  railway  on  which  ocean 
steamers  shall  be  lifted  to  cross  the  Isthmus  of 
Tehuantepec  from  ocean  to  ocean,  why,  in  their 
success,  the  Pennsylvanian  legislation  of  the 
twenties  will  be  remembered  and  justified. 

The  reader  in  America  should  remember  what 
Mr.  George  Morison  reminds  us  of  in  his  address 
at  Chicago,  that  there  never  has  been  a  time 
when  canals  were  considered  so  important  a  part 
of  the  transportation  system  of  Europe  as  in  this 
very  day. 

There  is  a  curious  letter  of  Robert  Fulton's, 
written  by  him  as  early  as  1807  to  Albert  Gal- 
latin,  then  Secretary  of  the  Treasury.  It  ac 
companies  Gallatin's  report  to  the  National 
Government  on  canal  communication.  Gallatin 
shows  how  freight  could  be  carried  from  Boston 


VOL.  I.  —  X 


306        MEMORIES    OF   A   HUNDRED    YEARS 

to  Savannah  without  exposure  to  an  enemy's 
cruisers.  This  report  was  prepared  in  days  when 
the  English  frigates  Belvedere  and  Leander  and 
Leopard  and  Guerriere  were  parading  up  and 
down  our  coasts,  were  occasionally  running  into 
our  waters  for  the  impudent  purchase  of  supplies, 
and  were  enraging  every  man  who  loved  his 
country  as  they  picked  off  seamen  at  the  will  of 
their  commanders  from  American  merchantmen. 
Gallatin  advised  the  Nation  to  send  its  freight 
barges  from  Boston  by  Weymouth  to  Taunton, 
in  a  canal  to  be  built  for  that  purpose.  Then  the 
canal-boats  would  sail  down  Taunton  River. 
They  were  then  to  run  the  gantlet  into  Long 
Island  Sound,  taking  the  chances  of  fog  arid 
northwest  gales  for  dodging  their  enemies  into 
these  safer  waters.  By  the  Sound  and  Hell- 
Gate  and  the  East  River  and  New  York  Harbor, 
behind  Staten  Island  perhaps,  they  were  to 
come  to  Amboy,  from  Amboy  to  cross  by  a 
canal  to  Philadelphia;  they  were  then  to  float 
down  the  Delaware  to  Wilmington,  to  cross  by 
another  canal  to  the  head  of  the  Chesapeake,  to  go 
down  the  Chesapeake  as  safely  and  prosperously 
as  Rochambeau  and  Washington  went.  Then, 
through  lines  which  adventurous  readers  take 
to-day  through  the  Dismal  Swamp,  for  instance, 


INTERNAL   IMPROVEMENT  307 

and  this  or  that  sound,  which  are  protected  from 
English  cruisers  and  easterly  storms  by  Cape 
Fear  and  Cape  Hatteras  and  Cape  Lookout,  the 
Hingham  pails  of  Massachusetts  and  the  negro- 
cloths  of  Woonsocket  were  to  be  delivered  at 
Savannah. 

I  cannot  find  that  Fulton's  interesting  letter 
is  alluded  to  by  any  of  his  so-called  biographers. 
He  discusses  in  detail  the  value  of  a  canal  sys 
tem.  Of  the  several  canals  suggested  by  Galla- 
tin  for  his  voyages  all  are  now  in  operation 
excepting  that  by  which  he  meant  to  cross 
Massachusetts. 

Fulton  says  in  his  letter  that  he  had  been 
pressing  canal  service  on  the  Nation  for  eleven 
years.  He  urged  a  good  canal  system,  first,  for 
its  effect  to  raise  the  value  of  the  public  lands ; 
second,  in  cementing  the  Union  and  extending 
the  principles  of  confederate  republican  govern 
ment.  "  At  the  conclusion  of  my  work  there  is 
a  letter  in  which  I  contemplate  the  time  when 
canals  should  pass  through  every  vale  and  wind 
around  each  hill,  and  bind  the  whole  country 
together  in  the  bonds  of  social  intercourse. 
And  I  am  now  hoping  to  find  that  the  period 
has  arrived  when  an  overflowing  treasury  ex 
hibits  abundant  resources  and  opens  the  mind  to 


308        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

works  of  such  immense  importance."  This  was 
written  on  the  eighth  day  of  December,  1807. 

Gal  latin's  table  at  the  end,  which  tells  how 
much  it  will  cost  to  build  the  necessary  canals 
between  Boston  and  Savannah,  shows  that  they 
need  only  be  eighty-eight  miles  long,  have  a 
total  lockage  of  548  feet,  and  cost  $3,050,000. 

Of  all  the  canal  enterprises  of  that  time,  I 
suppose  that  the  Chesapeake  and  Ohio  Canal  is 
now  the  most  important,  with  the  great  exception 
of  the  Erie.  I  believe  the  chief  service  of  this 
canal  is  the  delivery  of  Cumberland  coal  at  navi 
gable  waters.  It  never  reached  the  Ohio  River, 
as  its  name  and  charter  proposed. 

But  the  knell  of  American  canals  had,  for  the 
time,  struck.  In  1825  —  about  the  time  when, 
with  firing  of  cannons  and  ringing  of  bells,  New 
York  celebrated  the  marriage  of  the  Hudson 
with  Lake  Erie  —  George  Stephenson  built  a 
special  engine-factory  at  Newcastle-upon-Tyne  in 
England,  that  he  might  create  a  school  of  men. 
I  count  that  enterprise  as  the  date  when  modern 
civilization  begins.  He  meant  to  have  men  who 
could  build  machinery  which  could  be  relied 
upon.  He  created  a  school  of  men.  He  in 
vented  the  tubular  boiler,  and  those  men  and  he 
built  the  Rocket,  and  the  Rocket  won  the  prize 


INTERNAL    IMPROVEMENT  309 

of  five  hundred  pounds  which  the  Liverpool 
and  Manchester  Railway  had  offered  for  a 
workable  locomotive  engine.  The  word  "loco 
motive  "  came  into  use.  Modern  civilization 
was  changed. 

My  father  has  been  called,  rightly  enough,  I 
think,  the  founder  of  the  railroad  system  in  New 
England.  When  I  was  a  child,  he  made  with 
his  own  hand  a  model  of  a  railway,  which  stood 
in  our  parlor,  that  he  might  explain  to  visitors 
what  he  was  talking  about  when  he  spoke  of  a 
rail  or  a  flange  or  an  inclined  plane.  As  a  child, 
I  understood  as  well  as  I  understand  now  the 
look  of  pity  on  people's  faces  as  they  left  the 
room,  thinking  how  sad  it  was  that  a  man  of  as 
much  sense  as  he  should  give  himself  up  to  such 
delusion.  He  forced  the  Legislature  of  Massa 
chusetts  to  the  formation  of  an  Internal  Im 
provement  Commission,  and,  as  a  member  of 
that  Commission,  he  wrote  its  reports  after  the 
first. 

In  earlier  reports  of  the  Internal  Improvement 
Board  he  had  followed  up  in  detail  the  success 
of  Stephenson  and  of  steam  power  in  England. 
But  I  cannot  but  notice  that  in  their  first  report 
to  their  own  stockholders  the  Worcester  Rail 
road  Directors  do  not  even  allude  to  steam 


310        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

power.  It  seems  as  if  they  would  not  intro 
duce  at  a  business  meeting  a  subject  which  was 
still  matter  of  discussion ;  but  the  next  report 
takes  steam  power  almost  for  granted.  And 
it  was  as  early  as  1828  that  locomotive  engines 
had  been  used  in  New  Jersey,  in  Maryland, 
and  in  South  Carolina.  It  is  in  the  report  of 
1832  that  there  is  a  full  computation  made  of 
the  saving  of  steam  power  over  power  of  horses. 
Readers  in  New  England  will  be  amused  by  the 
statement  of  the  number  of  persons  who  travelled 
between  Boston  and  Worcester  in  the  year  1830 
and  the  year  immediately  before.  Fifty  thou 
sand  travellers  is  the  largest  which  can  be  esti 
mated  after  you  have  calculated  on  stage-coaches 
and  turnpike  tolls  and  have  guessed  at  private 
vehicles  which  went  over  the  old  road. 

In  the  case  of  the  Boston  and  Worcester  road, 
Mr.  John  Milton  Fessenden  was  engaged  as 
engineer-in-chief  —  a  young  gentleman  who  had 
graduated  at  West  Point  only  a  few  years  before. 
It  is  said  in  the  report  that  he  had  travelled  in 
Europe  and  had  seen  all  the  railways  in  Europe 
at  that  time.  In  his  first  report  he  compares 
the  price  and  value  of  the  T  rail  against  the  flat 
rail  which  was  used  on  most  of  the  early  Ameri 
can  roads.  He  speaks  of  the  Stevens  Rail  by 


INTERNAL    IMPROVEMENT  311 

name,  a  bit  of  which  was  presented  to  Mr. 
Carnegie  the  other  day.  When  this  is  spoken 
of  as  the  first  T  rail,  the  first  American  rail  is 
meant.  Stephenson  had  used  the  T  rail  in  Eng 
land  before  this  rail  was  rolled.  Those  of  us 
who  are  more  than  sixty  years  old  have  often 
ridden  over  flat  rails.  The  special  excitement  of 
such  a  ride  was  the  possibility  that  the  end  of 
the  rail  might  loosen,  and  that  the  wheel  of  the 
car  might  run  under  the  rail  instead  of  above  it. 
In  this  case  the  rail  became  what  was  called  a 
snake,  and,  with  its  sharp  point  entering  the 
bottom  of  the  car  as  the  train  went  on,  all  the 
passengers  who  sat  directly  over  the  rail  were 
transfixed  and  spitted  as  so  many  pigeons  might 
be  prepared  on  the  spit  for  dinner. 

The  State  of  Pennsylvania,  with  a  sort  of 
plucky  audacity  which,  as  it  seems  to  me,  has 
characterized  Pennsylvania  more  than  once, 
adopted  the  scheme  of  carrying  out  two  plans 
which  were  in  rivalry. 

Louis  Philippe  used  to  call  himself  the  repre 
sentative  of  the  juste  milieu  in  France.  His 
radical  enemies  used  to  say  that  the  King's 
principle  was  this :  One  set  of  men  said  two  and 
two  make  four;  another  set  of  men  said  two 
and  two  make  six ;  and  he  determined  that 


312 


MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 


two  and  two  make  five.  This  is  in  truth  a 
good  definition  of  the  juste  milieu.  The  State 
of  Pennsylvania  could  not  complete  a  canal  from 
Philadelphia  to  Pittsburg  because  of  the  Alle- 
ghany  Mountains.  Still  it  wanted  to  try  canals. 
They  started  a  canal  from  the  Susquehanna  up  the 
Juniata.  They  then  took  the  boats  on  the  rail- 


THE  PIONEER  LINE  STATION  AT  LANCASTER,  PENN. 

way  over  the  mountains,  and  on  another  canal 
carried  them  down  to  the  port  of  Pittsburg. 

In  the  year  1843  the  State  was  forced  to  sus 
pend  the  payment  of  the  interest  on  its  loan. 
The  loyal  citizens  of  the  State  felt  very  badly 
about  this,  and  no  wonder.  The  disgrace  was 
vividly  pointed  out  in  what  may  still  be  remem 
bered  as  Sydney  Smith's  letter  about  Pennsyl 
vania. 


INTERNAL    IMPROVEMENT  313 

The  men  of  character  and  ability  addressed 
themselves  at  once  to  reform  the  State's 
finances ;  the  back  interest  was  paid ;  and  at 
this  moment  the  credit  of  the  State  is  as  high 
as  it  ever  was.  In  this  crisis  the  railways  and 
canals  were  sold  to  the  great  Pennsylvania  Com 
pany  who  now  carry  us  from  Philadelphia  to 
Pittsburg  in  seven  or  eight  hours,  all  the  way 
by  rail. 

The  early  travellers  to  the  West  give  very 
amusing  accounts  of  the  transfer  from  water  to 
land  and  from  land  to  water.  Of  such  accounts, 
Dick  ens' s  in  the  "  American  Notes  "  is  perhaps 
the  best  remembered,  but  there  is  a  very  bright 
sketch  by  Mrs.  Stowe  which  ought  not  to  be 
forgotten :  — 

" '  But,  say,  there  ain't  any  danger  in  a  lock, 
is  there  ?  '  respond  the  querists.  '  Danger  ! ' 
exclaims  a  deaf  old  lady,  poking  up  her  head. 
'  What's  the  matter  ?  There  ain't  no  thin'  burst, 
has  there  ? '  '  No,  no,  no  ! '  exclaim  the  provoked 
and  despairing  opposition  party,  who  find  that 
there  is  no  such  thing  as  going  to  sleep  till  they 
have  made  the  old  lady  below  and  the  young 
ladies  above  understand  exactly  the  philosophy 
of  a  lock.  After  a  while  the  conversation 
again  subsides ;  again  all  is  still ;  you  hear  only 


314        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 


EXPRESS  PAST  LISTS. 


BO  VT 

OFFICE. 

For    rhiladelptna   and   Piilslwrg,  ntitatctf  near 

the  /)rpot.  Korth  Queen  Street.  Isincastcr, 

Tusu  doors  Sonih  of  Chamber  lin$ 

Hotel 

THIS  LINK  is  of  acknowledged  speed       Re- 
commendations     have,   been    given    by   the 
most  competent  judges.  IP  relation  >o   its  many 
Advantages      1  he  extreme  neatness  of 

THE  BOATS 


The  comfort  and  adaptation  of  the 

STAGES 


CAWS. 

•re  not  to  be  surpassed  by  anything  on  the  route. 
The  Fare  will  Se  as  low  us  ths,i  of  anv  of  the 
other  lines.  >»ul  the  agents  will  t>p  ready  arid 
wiHiYig  to  roiuiur*  tothe  comfort  of  ihe  passer.. 
gers.  sef  that  their  baggage  is  stnctlv  taken  care 
of.  and  look  to  every  nrr^ngemenj  necessary  to 
their  accommodation  The  Porter,  uho  is  known 
to  he  obliging.  •*«!!  convoy  baggage  »o  anv  j>art 
of  the  city  for  those  who  desire  •»  The  under- 
>'pne<l  Ajrent  will  endeavor  to  add  to  1|,e  com* 
fort  ofUiose  wUp  may  patromic  tbp  Express 
Lme 

WM     A     HAMRIUGHT 
FOR 


the  trampling  of 
horses  and  the 
rippling  of  the 
rope  in  the  water, 
and  sleep  again 
is  stealing  over 
you.  You  doze, 
you  dream,  and 
all  of  a  sudden 
you  are  startled 
by  a  cry,  '  Cham 
bermaid  !  Wake 
up  the  lady  that 
wants  to  be  set 
ashore/  Up 
jumps  chamber 
maid,  and  up 
jump  the  lady 
and  two  children, 
and  forthwith 
form  a  commit 
tee  of  inquiry  as 
to  ways  and 
means.  '  Where's 
my  bonnet?' 
says  the  lady, 
half  awake,  and 


INTERNAL   IMPROVEMENT  315 

fumbling'  among  the  various  articles  of  that 
name.  '  I  thought  I  hung  it  up  behind  the 
door.'  '  Can't  you  find  it  ? '  says  poor  chamber 
maid,  yawning  and  rubbing  her  eyes.  '  Oh,  yes, 
here  it  is,'  says  the  lady ;  and  then  the  cloak, 
the  shawl,  the  gloves,  the  shoes,  receive  each 
a  separate  discussion.  At  last  all  seems  ready, 
and  they  begin  to  move  off,  when,  lo !  Peter's 
cap  is  missing.  '  Now,  where  can  it  be  ? '  solilo 
quizes  the  lady.  '  I  put  it  right  here  by  the 
table  leg ;  maybe  it  got  into  one  of  the  berths ! ' 
At  this  suggestion  the  chambermaid  takes  the 
candle  and  goes  round  deliberately  to  every 
berth,  poking  the  light  directly  in  the  face  of 
every  sleeper.  e  Here  it  is,'  she  exclaims,  pull 
ing  at  something  black  under  one  pillow.  '  No, 
indeed,  those  are  my  shoes,'  says  the  vexed 
sleeper.  '  Maybe  it's  here,'  she  resumes,  dart 
ing  upon  something  dark  in  another  berth. 
6  No,  that's  my  bag,'  responds  the  occupant. 
The  chambermaid  then  proceeds  to  turn  over  all 
the  children  on  the  floor,  to  see  if  it  is  under 
them.  In  the  course  of  which  process  they  are 
not  agreeably  waked  up  and  enlivened ;  and 
when  everybody  is  broad  awake,  and  most  un 
charitably  wishing  the  cap,  and  Peter  too,  at 
the  bottom  of  the  Canal,  the  good  lady  exclaims, 


316 


MEMORIES    OF    A   HUNDRED    YEARS 


4  Well,  if  this  isn't  lucky ;  here  I  had  it  safe 
in  my  basket  all  the  time ! '  And  she  departs 
amid  the  —  what  shall  I  say  ?  —  execrations  ?  — 
of  the  whole  company,  ladies  though  they  be." 


THE  ERIE  CANAL. 


The  old  announcements  of  successive  steps  in 
the  advance *of  internal  transit  are  often  very 
funny.  Sometimes  the  appalling  ignorance  of 
the  future  crippled  men's  best  efforts.  In  the 
treaty  of  1814,  only  three  years  before  Clinton's 
first  spade  blow,  and  three  years  after  the  first 
Ohio  steamboat,  it  was  with  difficulty  that  even 
Mr.  Gallatin  and  Mr.  Clay  could  be  held  up  at 
Ghent  to  the  mark  of  retaining  for  the  United 
States  the  great  Northwestern  Territory.  "  What 


INTERNAL    IMPROVEMENT  317 

is  the  use  ?  It  only  gives  you  the  care  of  the 
Indians."  Yet  in  that  doubtful  territory  are 
now  our  States  of  Iowa,  Wisconsin,  half  Michi 
gan,  Minnesota,  and  who  shall  say  how  much 
of  the  country  westward  ? 

Neither  Gallatin  nor  Clay  apprehended  the 
value  of  the  steamboat  in  this  matter.  Here  is 
a  triumphant  announcement  from  the  Boston 
Weekly  Messenger  of  November  1,  1811,  as  to 
what  might  be  expected  of  it  — "  thirty-five 
miles  a  day  "  ! 

"TiiE  STEAMBOAT 

"  Built  at  Pittsburg,  by  Rosewelt  &  Co.,  for 
the  navigation  of  the  Ohio  and  Mississippi  rivers, 
to  carry  goods  and  passengers  between  New  Or 
leans  and  the  different  towns  on  those  rivers, 
was  loaded  at  Pittsburg  the  beginning  of  this 
month,  and  would  sail  about  the  10th  instant 
for  New-Orleans.  We  are  told  she  is  an  excel 
lent,  well  constructed  vessel,  about  140  feet  long, 
will  carry  400  tons  of  goods,  has  elegant  accom 
modations  for  passengers,  and  is  every  way  fitted 
in  great  stile.  It  is  supposed  that  she  will  go 
35  miles  a  day  against  the  stream,  and  thereby 
make  a  passage  from  Orleans  to  Pittsburg  in 
six  weeks ;  but  as  she  must  go  considerably 


318        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

faster  with  the  current,  she  will  make  the  pas 
sage  down  in  two  or  three  weeks." 

Observe  Rosewelt ! 

In  1811,  as  a  correspondent  reminds  me,  the 
passage,  even  on  the  Great  Lakes  from  Buffalo 
to  Detroit,  required  at  least  five  days  and  often 
twice  as  much. 

Here  is  a  facsimile  of  a  note  of  Clinton's, 
referring  to  his  master-work,  written  as  early 
as  1817:  — 


PART  OF  A  LETTER  WRITTEN  BY  DE  WITT  CLINTON  IN  1817. 


Memories  of  a  Hundred  Years 

VOLUME   II 


THE   ORATORS 


VOL.   II.  —  B 


EDWARD  EVERETT  HALE. 
From  a  drawiug  by  Alfred  Houghton  Clark. 


MEMOEIES  OF  A  HUNDEED  TEAES 

CHAPTER   I 

THE    ORATORS 

MODERN   AMERICAN   ORATORY 

THE  cant  phrase  of  conventional  conversation 
says  that  the  age  of  oratory  is  over.  I  do 
not  believe  this.  The  conditions  are  changed. 
The  methods  are  changed.  But  it  is  as  true  as 
it  ever  was  that  if  a  man  wants  to  lead  men,  he 
had  better  be  able  to  tell  men  what  he  wants. 
And  it  will  be  well  for  him  and  them  if  he  can 
tell  them  this,  so  that  they  shall  believe  him  and 
remember  afterward  what  he  has  said  to  them. 
William  McElroy,  who  is  himself  no  mean 
judge,  told  me  that  George  William  Curtis  once 
said  to  him  that  the  most  remarkable  passage  in 
modern  oratory,  the  passage,  that  is,  that  is  best 
worth  remembering,  is  the  passage  well  known 
and  often  cited  in  Waldo  Emerson's  oration  at 
Dartmouth  in  1838.  Carlyle  speaks  of  that  ad 
dress  as  lying  on  a  counter  in  an  Oxford  book- 

3 


4  MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

shop  and  arresting  Gladstone's  attention  before 
Gladstone  was  thirty  years  old. 

"  You  will  hear  every  day  the  maxims  of  a  low 
prudence.  You  will  hear  that  the  first  duty  is 
to  get  land  and  money,  place  and  name.  '  What 
is  this  Truth  you  seek,  what  is  this  Beauty  ? ' 
men  will  ask,  with  derision.  If  nevertheless 
God  have  called  any  of  you  to  explore  truth  and 
beauty,  be  bold,  be  firm,  be  true.  When  you 
shall  say,  'As  others  do,  so  will  I:  I  renounce, 
1  am  sorry  for  it,  my  early  visions ;  I  must  eat 
the  good  of  the  land  and  let  learning  and 
romantic  expectations  go,  until  a  more  con 
venient  season ; '  —  then  dies  the  man  in  you  ; 
then  once  more  perish  the  buds  of  art  and 
poetry  and  science,  as  they  have  died  already 
in  a  thousand  thousand  men.  The  hour  of  that 
choice  is  the  crisis  of  your  history,  and  see  that 
you  hold  yourself  fast  by  the  intellect." 

Mr.  McElroy  quoted  Curtis' s  remark  to  Roscoe 
Conkling,  who  differed  from  him.  He  said  that 
the  finest  passage  he  remembered  from  any  man 
of  his  time  is  Charles  Sprague's  reference  to  the 
American  Indian  in  a  Fourth  of  July  oration. 
One  would  be  glad  to  have  a  dozen  such  opinions 
from  a  dozen  such  leaders.  The  passage  which 
Mr.  Conkling  referred  to  is  this :  — 


MODERN   AMERICAN   ORATORY  5 

"  Roll  back  the  tide  of  time.  How  painfully 
to  us  applies  the  promise,  '  I  will  give  to  thee, 
the  heathen  for  an  inheritance.'  Not  many 
generations  ago,  where  you  now  sit,  circled  with 
all  that  exalts  and  embellishes  civilized  life,  the 
rank  thistle  nodded  in  the  wind  and  the  wild 
fox  dug  his  hole  uriscared.  Here  lived  and 
loved  another  race  of  beings.  Beneath  the 
same  sun  that  rolls  over  your  heads  the  Ind 
ian  hunter  pursued  the  panting  deer ;  gazing 
on  the  same  moon  that  smiles  for  you,  the 
Indian  lover  wooed  his  dusky  mate.  Here  the 
wigwam  blaze  beamed  on  the  tender  and  the 
helpless,  the  council-fire  glared  on  the  wise  and 
the  daring.  Now  they  dipped  their  noble  limbs 
in  your  sedgy  lakes,  and  now  they  paddled  the 
light  canoe  along  your  rocky  shores.  Here  they 
warred ;  the  echoing  whoop,  the  bloody  grapple, 
the  defying  death-song,  all  were  here ;  and  when 
the  tiger  strife  was  over,  here  curled  the  smoke 
of  peace.  Here,  too,  they  worshipped;  and 
from  many  a  dark  bosom  went  up  a  pure  prayer 
to  the  Great  Spirit.  He  had  not  written  his 
laws  for  them  on  tables  of  stone,  but  he  had 
traced  them  on  the  tables  of  their  hearts.  The 
poor  child  of  nature  knew  not  the  God  of  revela 
tion,  but  the  God  of  the  universe  he  acknowl- 


6  MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

edged  in  everything  around.  He  beheld  Him  in 
the  star  that  sank  in  beauty  behind  his  lowly 
dwelling,  in  the  sacred  orb  that  flamed  on  him 
from  his  midday  throne,  in  the  flower  that 
snapped  in  the  morning  breeze,  in  the  lofty  pine 
that  had  defied  a  thousand  whirlwinds,  in  the 
timid  warbler  that  never  left  its  native  grove,  in 
the  fearless  eagle  whose  untired  pinion  was  wet 
in  clouds,  in  the  worm  that  crawled  at  his  foot, 
and  in  his  own  matchless  form,  glowing  with  a 
spark  of  light  to  whose  mysterious  source  he 
bent  in  humble  though  blind  adoration." 


EXAMPLE  OF  EDMUND  BURKE 

Emerson  himself  had  an  enthusiastic  admira 
tion  for  Webster,  until  he  thought  he  had  be 
trayed  the  North.  To  the  day  of  his  death  he 
had  an  admiration  for  Edward  Everett,  whom 
he  had  known  first  when  he  was  a  professor  of 
Greek  literature  at  Harvard  College.  I  shall 
speak  of  Emerson  in  another  place,  but  this  is 
perhaps  the  best  place  to  say  that  he  had  an 
opinion  quite  indefensible  as  to  the  knack  of 
absolutely  extempore  speech,  —  a  knack  which, 
according  to  me,  any  one  can  master.  But 
Emerson  did  not  think  so. 


EXAMPLE    OF   EDMUND    BURKE  7 

When  the  century  came  in,  the  echoes  of 
Edmund  Burke's  voice  were  still  resounding  in 
England  and  America.  In  Mr.  Everett's  preface 
to  Webster's  works,  and  in  a  passage  of  his  own 
autobiography,  he  refers  to  the  impression  which 
Burke's  eloquence  made  on  the  minds  of  all  edu 
cated  young  Americans.  You  can  trace  it,  I 
think,  even  in  Webster's  earliest  addresses.  It 
will  not  do  to  speak  lightly  of  Burke,  but 
Webster  was  a  greater  man  than  Burke,  and  one 
likes  to  see  that  he  outgrew  such  tricks  of  ora 
tory.  There  are  phrases  of  his  which  Burke 
could  never  have  written. 

Here  is  one  of  Mr.  Everett's  confessions : 
"  When  I  was  at  College  the  English  authors 
most  read  and  admired,  at  least  by  me,  and 
I  believe  generally  by  my  contemporaries, 
were  Johnson,  Gibbon,  and  Burke.  I  yielded 
myself  with  boyish  enthusiasm  to  their  irresist 
ible  fascination.  But  the  stately  antithesis, 
the  unvarying  magnificence,  and  the  bound 
less  wealth  of  diction  of  these  great  masters, 
amply  sustained  in  them  by  their  learning,  their 
power  of  thought,  and  weight  of  authority,  are 
too  apt,  on  the  part  of  youthful  imitators,  to  de 
generate  into  ambitious  wordiness."  It  is  plea 
sant  to  see  that  Charles  Sprague,  to  whom 


8  MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

Conkling  alluded,  had  recognized  the  power  of 
Webster's  speech  six  years  before  the  Hayne  ad 
dresses.  Here  is  what  he  said  on  the  4th  of 
July,  1825  :  "  The  struggling  nations  point  to 
our  example,  and  in  their  own  tongues  repeat 
the  cheering  language  of  our  sympathy.  Al 
ready,  when  a  master  spirit  towers  among  them, 
they  call  him  their  Washington.  Along  the  foot 
of  the  Andes  they  breathe  in  gratitude  the  name 
of  Clay ;  by  the  ivy-buried  ruins  of  the  Parthe 
non  they  bless  the  eloquence  of  Webster ! " 
Mr.  Everett  more  than  once  speaks  almost  as  if 
he  himself  had  been  misled  by  Burke  in  his 
own  earlier  days ;  and  in  revising  his  earlier 
addresses  for  the  standard  edition  of  his  "  Ora 
tions  "  he  sometimes  tones  down  the  exuber 
ance  of  what  he  would  have  called  boyish 
rhetoric. 

I  may  say  in  passing  that  dear  Dr.  James 
Walker  was  once  talking  to  me  of  the  advan 
tages  of  repeating  in  the  pulpit  an  old  sermon : 
"  You  may  alter  the  arrangement,  you  may 
change  the  illustrations,  you  can  improve  the 
argument  perhaps,  and,  above  all,  you  can  leave 
out  all  the  fine  passages." 

But  I  hesitate  a  little  about  printing  this 
amusing  bit  of  criticism.  In  Everett's  case  I 


EXAMPLE   OF   EDMUND   BURKE  9 

am  quite  sure  that  he  did  not  always  improve 
the  text  by  such  severity  of  older  years. 

Mrs.  Browning,  in  "  Lady  Geraldine's  Court 
ship,"  in  later  editions  tones  down  what  was 
once  written,  — 

"  And  the  resonant  steam  eagles 
Follow  far  on  the  directing  of  her  floating  dove-like  hand  " 

to 

"  And  the  palpitating  engines  snort  in  steam  across  her 
acres." 

One  remembers  all  about  the  theory  of  realism 
and  the  rest,  but,  after  all,  "  steam  eagles  "  was 
better. 

Tennyson,  in  the  same  way,  tones  down 
"  Locksley  Hall."  But  youth  is  youth.  And 
the  average  reader  of  poetry  is  less  than  thirty 
years  of  age.  Can  we  not  let  young  men  speak 
to  young  men  as  young  men  like  to  speak  to 
young  men  and  to  young  women  ? 

EDWARD   EVERETT 

After  Mr.  Everett's  defeat  in  1839  in  the 
Massachusetts  election  for  Governor,  an  occasion 
still  remembered  in  our  local  politics,  in  which 
he  lost  his  election  literally  by  one  vote,  he  went 


10 


MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 


to  Europe  for  a  long  stay.  In  the  next  autumn 
there  followed  a  great  revulsion  in  the  National 
history.  For  once  the  West  and  the  North 


EDWARD  EVERETT. 
From  a  daguerreotype. 


united  against  the  South,  and  William  Henry 
Harrison  was  chosen  President.  He  made  Mr. 
Webster  his  Secretary  of  State,  and  Mr.  Webster 
offered  to  Mr.  Everett  the  post  of  our  Minister 


EDWARD    EVERETT  11 

to  London.  Mr.  Everett  went  to  London  in 
1841  and  remained  there  until  the  autumn  of 
1845,  rendering  essential  services  to  the  Nation, 
and  proved  himself  better  acquainted  with  our 
international  relations  than  any  other  man  liv 
ing.  This  might  well  be,  as  he  was  one  of  the 
few  men  who  used  familiarly  the  languages  of 
the  Continent  of  Europe,  and  as  he  had  never 
lost  sight  of  the  interests  which  were  intrusted 
to  him,  when  he  was  in  Congress,  as  a  member 
of  the  Committee  on  Foreign  Relations.  I  may 
say  here  that  his  attachment  to  Mr.  Webster, 
which  was  very  close,  was  never  broken. 

I  happened,  as  a  youngster,  to  be  standing  by 
so  that  I  saw  a  pretty  incident  which  is  a  good 
illustration  of  what  happens  in  a  democracy, 
where  "  our  governors  are  from  ourselves."  I 
was  with  Mr.  Everett  when  he  was  Governor  and 
was  visiting  the  \Yorcester  jail.  The  sheriff,  an 
accomplished  gentleman,  said  to  the  Governor 
that  they  had  a  prisoner  waiting  trial  whom  no 
one  could  understand.  The  man  was  a  Levantine, 
as  it  proved  ;  but  their  Italian  interpreters  could 
make  nothing  of  his  language.  Mr.  Everett 
tried  him  in  Italian  with  as  little  success.  But 
instantly  we  could  see  the  glow  of  satisfaction 
on  both  their  faces  when  he  changed  to  modern 


12  MEMORIES    OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

Greek  and  the  poor  prisoner  could  tell  his 
story. 

Mr.  Everett  was  very  fond  of  me  from  my 
childhood,  and  very  good  to  me.  I  think  he 
talked  with  me  with  a  certain  intimacy  which  he 
seldom  enjoyed  with  others.  For  the  misfortune 
of  his  life  was  that  he  was  a  very  shy  man. 
Since  his  death  people  have  said  to  me  that  they 
always  noticed  in  the  street  that  he  was  walking 
alone. 

He  said  to  me  one  day  in  the  spring  of  1846 
that  it  was  already  long  enough,  since  his  return 
from  Europe,  for  him  to  satisfy  himself  that  the 
stately  oration  of  twenty  years  before  was  for 
America  a  thing  of  the  past.  He  advised  me  as 
a  young  man  to  accustom  myself  to  speak  to 
large  or  small  audiences  without  a  manuscript 
before  me,  to  accept  the  more  colloquial  habit, 
which  I  think  he  would  have  called  the  "  habit 
of  the  stump." 1  After  this  time  he  prepared 
some  of  his  own  most  elaborate  written  addresses  ; 
but  I  doubt  if  he  ever  carried  the  manuscript 
into  the  assembly  where  he  was  to  speak.  In 
an  interview  in  his  own  beautiful  library,  when 

1  About  the  same  time,  Orville  Dewey  told  me  how  to  do  it. 
I  think  it  was  he  who  told  me  always  to  speak  in  public  "  when 
ever  any  one  was  fool  enough  to  ask  "  me. 


EDWARD   EVERETT  13 

we  were  both  fifteen  years  older,  he  said  to  me 
that  in  preparing  an  address  he  then  never  pnt 
on  paper  any  bit  of  narrative.  If  you  know 
what  you  are  describing,  you  can  tell  it  with 
most  spirit  if  you  are  not  in  the  least  fettered. 
I  might  add  that,  with  a  memory  like  his,  you 
might  be  sure  to  make  no  mistake  as  to  the 
facts.  But  for  a  matter  of  persuasion,  of  logic, 
or  argument  in  any  form,  he  thought  that  this 
should  be  prepared  in  advance,  with  all  the  cau 
tion  which  is  implied  in  the  use  of  pen,  ink,  and 
paper.  Thus,  in  his  own  address  on  George 
Washington,  he  did  not  write  down  the  nar 
rative  of  Braddock's  defeat  until  he  wrote  it 
down  for  the  printed  edition.  It  was  a  new 
story  to  every  audience.  But  the  philippic 
against  Marlborough,  and  the  conclusion  of  the 
address,  were,  to  the  last  letter,  considered  in 
advance.  And  though  he  never  took  the  paper 
upon  the  stage,  these  were  the  same  to  every 
audience. 

As  I  went  away  from  this  talk,  he  said : 
"  Come  round  when  you  can,  and  I  will  tell  you 
how  I  get  up  an  address,  for  I  think  I  have 
some  methods  which  other  men  do  not  know." 
I  cried  out,  laughing,  that  I  thought  so  too,  and 
that  every  one  else  thought  so.  He  was  not  dis- 


14          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

pleased,  and  said  that  when  I  could  come  round 
he  would  tell  me  what  his  secrets  were.  Alas  ! 
these  must  have  been  the  last  words  I  heard  him 
speak.  The  next  time  I  saw  his  face  it  was 
silent  in  death.  His  death  was  very  sudden,  fol 
lowing  immediately  on  an  appeal  in  Faneuil  Hall 
for  the  destitute  people  of  Savannah. 

There  are  two  or  three  foolish  anecdotes  afloat, 
which  I  hear  more  often  than  I  like  to,  about  his 
preparing  stage  effects  in  advance.  All  these 
fables  are  based  on  the  supposition  that  he  had 
no  presence  of  inind  before  an  audience,  and  that 
he  could  do  nothing  in  situations  which  he  had 
not  anticipated.  The  truth  is,  on  the  other 
hand,  that  he  was  never  so  much  himself  as 
when  he  was  before  an  audience,  and  that  he 
rather  liked  any  suggestion  of  the  moment 
which  broke  up  the  stiffness  of  what  you  might 
call  ex  cathedra  or  academic  discourse.  His 
friend  John  Henry  Clifford,  afterward  Gover 
nor  of  Massachusetts,  was  one  of  his  staff 
when  he  was  Governor.  He  once  told  me  this 
story :  — 

In  the  year  1837  Mr.  Everett  had  accepted 
an  invitation  to  speak  at  Williams  College.  This 
College  had  never  been  visited  before  by  a  Gov 
ernor;  but  at  this  time  the  Western  railway 


EDWARD    EVERETT  15 

had  been  opened,  and  it  was  with  a  certain  en 
thusiasm  that  the  Commencement  exercises  of 
that  year  were  undertaken,  because  the  western 
county  of  Berkshire  was  really  for  the  first  time 
united  to  the  capital  of  the  State.  The  College 
was  proud,  the  people  were  proud,  that  the  Gov 
ernor  was  to  be  there ;  but  Mr.  Everett,  quite 
unconscious  of  this  sort  of  feeling,  had  prepared 
and  taken  with  him  an  oration,  such  as  he  might 
have  delivered  at  Phi  Beta  at  Cambridge,  on  the 
"  Influence  of  German  Thought  on  the  Contem 
porary  Literature  of  England  and  America."  I 
once  thought  I  detected  the  oration  in  another 
place.  He  arrived  with  his  staff  on  the  evening 
of  the  loth  of  August,  and  was  entertained  at  a 
great  social  party  by  the  President.  He  found, 
undoubtedly  to  his  satisfaction,  that  "half  the 
county  had  come  in,"  and  that  the  occasion  was 
one  not  so  much  of  literary  importance  as  of 
Massachusetts  pride. 

Accordingly,  next  day,  when  the  time  for  his 
oration  came,  he  delivered  an  address  on  the 
"  Relations  of  the  Frontier  Towns  of  New  Eng 
land  to  the  History  of  the  World,"  as  exhibited 
in  the  French  War,  in  which  Ephraim  Williams 
was  a  commander  of  Massachusetts  troops,  —  the 
same  Ephraim  Williams  who  had  founded  the 


16          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

new  college.  The  address  was  received  with 
the  absolute  enthusiasm  which  waited  on  his  elo 
quence  everywhere.  As  the  assembly  passed  out 
from  the  church,  Clifford  met  in  the  porch  one 
of  the  fine  old  Berkshire  sachems,  a  gentleman 
of  position  and  cultivation,  as  enthusiastic  as  the 
rest.  Clifford  said  to  him,  "And  how  do  you 
like  our  Governor  ?  "  "  Like  him  ?  I  am  only 
thinking  what  a  fool  I  am.  I  talked  to  him  for 
an  hour  at  the  President's  party,  and,  by  Jove,  I 
was  telling  him  things  that  he  knew  better  than 
I  do."  The  simple  truth  was  that  through  that 
hour  the  Governor  had  been  pumping  his  Berk 
shire  man  for  local  detail  which  the  next  morn 
ing  had  been  reflected  on  the  Berkshire  audience. 
The  address  itself  had  all  the  charm  of  a  man 
who  seemed  to  the  manor  born,  while  he  brought 
to  it  all  the  eloquence  of  classical  education  and 
of  European  travel. 

More  than  once  I  have  had  to  report  Mr. 
Everett  verbatim  in  some  careful  address,  and 
you  must  trust  me  when  I  say  that  the  address 
itself,  with  its  fresh  and  personal  contact  with 
the  audience,  was  always  superior  to  the  manu 
script  which  in  the  severity  of  his  habit  he  had 
prepared  before. 

He  was  hopelessly  sensitive  to  what  the  press 


* 


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I  1 


\> 

I 


C 


H 


EDWARD    EVERETT  21 

printed,  not  knowing  what  1,  who  was  bred  in  a 
newspaper  office,  know,  first,  that  of  whatever  is 
put  in  the  newspaper,  half  the  people  who  see  it 
do  not  read  it ;  second,  that  half  of  those  do  not 
understand  it ;  third,  that  of  the  half  who  under 
stand  it,  half  do  not  believe  it ;  fourth,  that  of 
the  half  who  believe  it,  fully  half  forget  it ;  fifth, 
that  the  half  who  remember  it  are  probably  of 
no  great  account  anyway.  This  may  be  accepted 
by  way  of  a  parenthesis  and  forgotten  with  the 
rest. 

The  year  I  was  thirteen  years  old  Mr.  Everett 
was  to  deliver  an  address  which  I  think  one 
of  his  best.  It  was  at  Lexington,  Mass.,  on 
the  sixtieth  anniversary  of  the  Battle  of  Lex 
ington.  He  had  tact  enough,  and  so  much  kind 
ness  that  he  came  over  one  day  and  asked  me  to 
hunt  up  for  him  this  quotation :  - 

"  Where  should  the  soldier  rest  but  where  he  fell  ?  " 

It  is  an  excellent  line,  but  written,  I  now 
think,  by  himself.  I  was  honored  by  his  asking 
me  to  help  him  in  the  address,  and  went  down 
to  the  Athenaeum  and  ran  my  eye  through  prob 
ably  three  or  four  hundred  odes  and  poems 
which  seemed  to  be  possible  sources  of  the  line. 
I  did  not  find  it,  and  as  I  have  not  found  it  in 


22          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

sixty-six  years  more,  I  do  not  believe  it  is  to  be 
found,  except  on  the  last  page  of  the  Lexington 
address  where  he  used  it  on  this  occasion,  and  in 
other  places  where  I  have  quoted  it.  Having 
had  this  share  in  the  preparation  of  the  address, 
I  begged  eagerly  at  school  and  at  home  that  I 
might  be  permitted  to  go  to  Lexington  and  hear 
it.  But  no !  The  rules  of  the  school  did  not 
permit  the  absence  for  a  few  hours  of  a  boy  who 
was  "preparing  for  college,"  and  so  I  lost  my 
chance.1  At  the  same  moment,  probably,  I 
contracted  a  disgust  for  the  mechanism  of  the 
public  schools  which  I  have  ventured  to  ex 
press  on  all  proper  occasions  between  that  time 
and  this. 

I  had,  however,  had  a  chance,  on  the  6th  of 
September,  1834,  to  crowd  into  Faneuil  Hall 
with  the  boys  who  had  no  tickets,  in  time  to 
hear  the  close  of  his  eulogy  on  Lafayette.  Mr. 
Everett  was  an  enthusiast  about  Lafayette ;  and 
let  me  say  here  that  all  the  men  who  knew  La- 


1  But  only  three  years  before,  as  a  friend  reminds  me,  when 
Mr.  Webster  came  on  to  "  address  his  fellow  citizens  in  Faneuil 
Hall  in  regard  to  Jackson's  Nullification  Proclamation  and  to 
persuade  them  to  support  him  in  the  course  he  took,  the  Latin 
School  boys  were  dismissed  and  sent  down  to  the  Hall  to  hear 
him."  It  is  just  possible  that  the  Master  wanted  to  go  himself 
on  this  occasion. 


EDWARD   EVERETT  23 

fayette  best  were  enthusiastic  about  him.  It  is 
only  people  who  did  not  know  him,  like  Carlyle, 
who  speak  of  him  with  contempt. 

When  I  am  asked,  as  Mr.  Conkling  was,  what 
are  the  passages  of  oratory  which  I  remember  as 
most  impressive,  I  am  apt  to  recur  to  the  close 
of  that  eulogy.  Near  the  close  of  his  address 
Mr.  Everett  freed  himself  entirely  from  every 
conventionality  of  the  platform,  as  he  turned  his 
back  upon  his  hearers  to  Stuart's  Washington 
and  to  the  bust  of  Lafayette  which  were  behind 
him,  and  cried,  "  Break  the  long  silence  of  that 
votive  canvas !  Speak  !  speak  !  marble  lips, 
and  teach  us  the  love  of  liberty  protected  by 
law!" 

Nothing  is  more  absurd  than  the  habit  current 
in  our  day  of  referring  to  Everett's  eloquence  as 
if  it  were  academic  or  as  the  address  of  a  supe 
rior  to  inferiors.  In  truth,  he  brought  his  audi 
ence  into  sympathy  with  himself  almost  as  soon 
as  he  began,  and  carried  them  with  him  as  if 
they  were  all  in  the  same  boat. 

I  heard  an  undergraduate  say  once,  of  a 
preacher  of  whom  he  was  fond,  "  By  Jove,  he 
reads  the  Bible,  not  only  as  if  he  thought  it  the 
most  important  book  of  books,  but  as  if  he 
thought  we  thought  so."  In  this  rough  epigram 


24          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

I  am  disposed  to  think  is  contained  the  defini 
tion  of  what  constitutes  real  eloquence,  —  the 
sympathy,  at  least  for  the  time,  of  the  speaker 
and  the  hearer.  As  so  many  men  have  said, 
the  audience  teaches  the  speaker,  not  what 
he  is  to  say,  perhaps,  but  how  he  is  to 
say  it. 

But  on  all  that  matter  the  diligent  reader  had 
better  refer  to  Mr.  Everett's  own  preface  to 
Webster's  orations. 

Writing  in  1856,  eleven  years  after  his  return 
from  London,  Mr.  Everett  says  of  the  American 
community  of  the  first  quarter  of  the  century, 
that  the  great  events  and  the  anniversaries  of 
the  last  half  century  "  were  well  adapted  to  ex 
cite  the  minds  of  youthful  writers  and  speakers 
and  to  give  a  complexion  to  their  thoughts  and 
style.  They  produced,  if  I  mistake  not,  in  the 
community  at  large,  a  feeling  of  comprehensive 
patriotism,  which  I  fear  has,  in  a  considerable 
degree,  passed  away.  While  it  lasted,  it 
prompted  a  strain  of  sentiment  which  does  not 
now,  as  it  seems  to  me,  find  a  cordial  response 
from  the  people  in  any  part  of  the  country. 
Awakened  from  the  pleasing  visions  of  former 
years  by  the  fierce  recriminations  and  dark  fore 
bodings  of  the  present  day,  I  experience  the  feel- 


EDWARD   EVERETT  25 

ing  of  the  ancient    dreamer  when  cured  of  his 
harmless  delusions :  — 

"' — me  occidistis,  amici, 
Non  servastis,  ait,  cui  sic  extorta  voluptas, 
Et  demtus  per  vim  mentis  gratissimus  error.' "  : 

This  seems  to  me,  writing  in  1902,  to  be  a 
very  pathetic  sign  of  the  time.  He  wrote  it  in 
the  midst  of  the  recriminations  which  preceded 
the  war.  You  can  hardly  make  a  Massachusetts 
man  believe  to-day  that  our  Massachusetts  Legis 
lature  refused  to  display  the  United  States  flag 
on  the  State  House  of  Massachusetts.  And  I 
fancy  that  to-day  any  Mississippi  man  would  be 
scandalized  if  I  reprinted  Logan's  fine  remark, 
when  speaking  of  that  State  in  1863,  "They  do 
not  know  the  American  flag  when  they  see  it, 
they  do  not  know  anything  good,  they  do  not 
know  anything  at  all."  Certainly,  in  1902, 
nobody  says  such  things,  and  I  do  not  think 
there  are  many  people  who  believe  them. 

1  "  '  —  ah,  friends,'  he  cried, 

'  You  meant  to  save  me.  Better  far  have  died ! ' 
For  when  they  snatched  away  his  joy,  they  took 
The  gracious  error  which  had  blessed  his  life." 


26  MEMORIES    OF   A   HUNDRED    YEARS 

DANIEL   WEBSTER, 

The  poet  Lowell  had  left  college  for  a  few 
months  when  he  went  into  Boston,  on  the  9th 
of  November,  1838,  "to  look  out  for  a  place  in 
business."  I  think  I  never  pass  the  rather  gro 
tesque  Parthenon  front  of  our  old  Court  House 
in  Boston  without  thinking  of  that  walk  of 
Lowell's,  as  he  came  through  Cambridge  Street 
into  Court  Street.  Observe  that  at  ten  o'clock 
on  that  9th  of  November  he  meant  to  go  into 
mercantile  life.  "  I  was  induced,  en  passant,  to 
step  into  the  United  States  District  Court,  where 
there  was  a  case  pending  in  which  Webster  was 
one  of  the  counsel  retained.  I  had  not  been 
there  an  hour  before  I  determined  to  continue  in 
my  profession  (of  the  law)  and  study  as  well  as 
I  could !  "  This  was  what  happened  to  Lowell 
when  he  was  nineteen  years  old.  I  may  as  well 
say  here  that  he  studied  law  seriously  and  to 
such  purpose  that  when  it  came  to  be  his  turn 
to  be  a  diplomatist  in  Spain  and  in  England  he 
knew  perfectly  well  what  he  was  about,  and  had 
no  superior  in  his  business. 

I  tell  that  story  because  it  shows  the  sort  of 
impression  which  Mr.  Webster  made  on  all  in 
telligent  people.  I  have  quoted  above  what 


DANIEL  WEBSTER. 
From  a  daguerreotype. 


DANIEL   WEBSTER  29 

Charles  Sprague,  who  was  an  excellent  critic, 
said  of  him  fourteen  years  before.  But  Webster 
himself  says,  "  Eloquence  does  not  consist  in 
speech ;  it  is  derived  from  the  man,  the  subject, 
and  from  the  occasion." 

The  theory  of  the  Hall  of  Statuary  in  Wash 
ington  is  that  each  State  shall  furnish  a  statue 
of  the  two  most  distinguished  men  in  its  history. 
I  think  most  men  who  care  for  history  would 
say  that  the  two  most  distinguished  Massachu 
setts  men,  since  1620,  have  been  Benjamin 
Franklin  and  Daniel  Webster  ;  Benjamin  Frank 
lin  is  mentioned  in  any  history  of  modern  times, 
Daniel  Webster  in  any  history  of  America. 

But  it  so  happened  that  Massachusetts  drove 
Benjamin  Franklin  away  when  he  was  seventeen 
years  old.  He  served  the  State  afterward  at  a 
very  important  crisis  as  her  agent  in  England ; 
but  he  lived  in  Philadelphia,  in  London,  and  in 
Paris. 

So  we  could  not  have  Franklin's  statue  in  the 
Statuary  Hall,  because  he  did  not  live  in  Boston. 
That  was  his  misfortune  and  ours.  On  the  other 
hand,  Daniel  Webster  was  born  in  New  Hamp 
shire.  He  came  to  Boston  to  study  law  with 
Christopher  Gore  in  the  year  1804,  almost 
precisely  as  Benjamin  Franklin  went  to  Phila- 


30          MEMORIES   OF   A  HUNDRED   YEARS 

delphia  to  study  life  when  he  was  a  little 
younger.  In  1816  Mr.  Webster  came  to  Boston 
to  live,  and  Massachusetts  was  his  home  from 
that  time  until  he  died  in  1852.  But  his  statue 
cannot  be  in  the  Statuary  Hall  for  Massachusetts, 
because  he  was  not  born  there. 

For  the  same  reason  which  keeps  him  out, 
Benjamin  Franklin  is  kept  out  from  the  Penn 
sylvania  statues.  Of  the  two  statues  of  Pennsyl 
vania,  the  first  is  of  Robert  Fulton,  who  would 
be  left  out  by  the  rule  by  which  Massachusetts 
left  out  Franklin.  Of  the  other  most  of  my 
present  readers  never  heard.  I  should  like  the 
guess  of  those  who  are  not  informed  as  to  the 
two  which  Massachusetts  has  there.  New  Hamp 
shire  gave  a  home  to  Daniel  Webster  in  the  Hall. 
Fortunately,  the  Nation  has  had  no  such  restric 
tions  as  bound  Pennsylvania  and  Massachusetts. 
In  the  decision  as  to  the  Hall  of  Fame  in  New 
York  last  year,  Washington  and  Lincoln  stand 
first.  In  the  second  rank  are  Franklin  and 
Webster,  "tied"  in  an  even  vote.  When  the 
busts  of  these  two  statesmen  are  erected,  it  will 
be  literally  true  that  the  stones  which  the  build 
ers  rejected  stand  very  near  the  head  of  the 
corner.  And  in  the  Capitol,  where  Franklin  is 
left  out  from  the  statuary  halls,  he  does  stand 


DANIEL   WEBSTER  31 

with   John   Hancock   by   the    staircase   in   the 
Senate  corridor. 

All  this  by  way  of  preface  to  my  own  per 
sonal  recollection  of  Mr.  Webster,  who  removed 
to  Boston  from  Portsmouth  six  years  after  my 
father  arrived  there.  I  think  they  had  known 
each  other  at  Exeter.  I  think  my  father  had 
once  or  twice  taken  Ezekiel  Webster's  place  in 
his  school  at  Kingston  Street  in  Boston  when 
Ezekiel  was  not  well.  What  I  know  is,  that 
from  the  time  Mr.  Webster  came  to  Boston  the 
two  families  were  very  intimate  with  each  other. 
Mr.  Webster  had  been  a  member  of  Congress 
from  New  Hampshire,  and  his  war  speeches, 
which  are  important  and  very  interesting,  were 
made  when  he  represented  New  Hampshire.  In 
1814  his  house  in  Portsmouth  was  burned  down, 
and  I  think  it  was  always  a  grief  to  him  that 
the  library  which  he  had  already  collected,  which 
was  of  interest  and  value,  was  destroyed.  Ac 
cording  to  his  biographers,  who  knew,  I  suppose, 
it  was  this  misfortune  which  determined  him  on 
leaving  New  Hampshire.  He  went  to  Albany 
to  consider  the  advantages  which  that  city  of 
fered  for  his  residence  and  practice  of  the  law. 
One  cannot  read  all  this  without  asking  what 
would  have  happened  IF  — 


32          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

Here  was  the  first  statesman  of  his  time  ;  here 
was  the  first  orator  of  his  time;  here  was  the 
most  remarkable  American  of  the  nineteenth 
century.  If  he  had  lived  in  Albany  for  the  rest 
of  his  life,  what  would  the  history  of  New  York 
and  of  the  United  States  have  been  ?  Would 
the  politics  of  New  York  have  been  what  John 
Quincy  Adams  called  them  in  1829  —  one  of  the 
devil's  own  unaccountables  ?  Would  the  influ 
ence  of  that  State,  from  Burr's  time  to  Marcy's, 
have  been  turned  steadily  in  the  scale  of  the 
Southern  oligarchy  ?  These  are  interesting  ques 
tions  for  people  who  like  to  ask  questions  which 
are  useless.  They  are  thrown  out  now  for  the 
benefit  of  old  gentlemen  of  eighty  who  are  living 
in  their  comfortable  homes  on  the  slopes  of  the 
Rocky  Mountains,  whose  mails  have  been  broken 
up  by  freshets,  so  that  they  have  heard  nothing 
from  the  modern  world  for  the  last  few  weeks. 
We  will  not  consider  them  any  longer. 

My  father  had  had  a  similar  question  before 
him  when  he  went  to  Troy  in  the  autumn  of 
1805.  He  had  decided  to  come  to  Boston,  and 
had  arrived  here  in  the  spring  of  1806.  Mr. 
Webster  had  decided  to  come  to  Boston,  and  he 
arrived  here  in  1816.  His  name  appears  in  the 
Boston  Directory  of  that  day  as  residing  in  Som- 


DANIEL   WEBSTER  33 

erset  Street,  from  which  he  removed  to  Mount 
Vernon  Street. 

In  the  same  year  my  father  was  married.  I 
speak  of  this  here  because  from  the  very  begin 
ning,  so  far  as  I  can  see,  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Webster 
were  most  intimate  friends  at  our  house.  Al 
most  every  summer  it  was  the  habit  of  my 
father  to  go  somewhere  with  him  shooting. 
Boston  men  did  that  more  then  than  they  do 
now  ;  I  suppose  there  were  more  birds  then.  So 
it  happened  that  in  August,  1826,  my  father  and 
mother,  and  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Webster,  and  Judge 
Story  and  Judge  Fay,  went  down  to  Sandwich 
and  stayed  for  a  week,  more  or  less,  at  Fessen- 
den's  Tavern  (the  word  hotel  for  an  inn  was 
hardly  known  in  New  England  for  many  years 
afterward).  I  was  a  boy  four  years  old,  and 
Edward  Webster,  my  nearest  friend,  having 
passed  his  birthday,  was  rated  as  five.  We  boys 
were  forever  together,  and  at  that,  time  it  was 
that  I  first  fired  a  gun.  This  was  very  likely 
Mr.  Webster's  gun.  The  gentlemen  came  home 
from  shooting  one  afternoon,  and  there  was  a 
barrel  which  had  not  been  emptied.  I  was  per 
mitted  to  rest  it  over  a  rail  and  fire  it  at  a  shin 
gle.  I  did  this  with  awful  terror,  but  was  greatly 
pleased  when  I  had  succeeded  and  was  not  killed. 

VOL.   II.  — D 


34          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

I  tell  this  in  detail  simply  to  speak  of  Mr. 
Webster's  abundant  kindness  to  children  always. 
One  of  my  earliest  recollections  is  of  sitting  at  a 
large  table  at  his  house  in  Summer  Street,  when 
we  were  all  playing  "  commerce "  together.  I 
said  :  "  I  have  not  got  a  counter  left.  I  wonder 
if  there  is  any  friend  who  will  lend  me  some  ?  " 
Mr.  Webster  was  sitting  next  me ;  with  charac 
teristic  tenderness  and  lavishness,  he  said,  "  Ed 
ward,  so  long  as  I  live  you  shall  never  say  you 
have  not  a  friend,"  and  pushed  over  as  many  of 
the  red  and  white  counters  as  I  needed. 

My  intimacy  with  Edward  Webster  continued 
all  through  our  school  and  college  life ;  indeed, 
till  he  threw  away  his  life  in  the  Mexican  War. 
Mr.  Webster's  intimacy  with  my  father  contin 
ued  till  his  death,  and  naturally,  therefore,  I  saw 
him  much  more  than  most  boys  or  young  men 
could  have  seen  a  man  of  his  age. 

There  is  a  good  anecdote,  which  is  not  one  of 
my  remembrances,  but  which  is  perfectly  well 
authenticated,  that  when  he  was  delivering  one 
of  his  great  addresses,  Mrs.  Webster  was  in  the 
gallery  of  the  church,  where  she  had  taken  Ed 
ward,  my  little  friend,  I  suppose  in  order  that  he 
might  remember  hearing  his  father  on  a  critical 
occasion.  In  the  course  of  the  address,  Mr. 


DANIEL   WEBSTER  35 

Webster,  in  his  most  vigorous  way,  cried  out, 
"Will  any  man  dare  say"  —  so  that  the  child 
was  himself  impressed  with  the  folly  of  any 
person  contradicting  his  father,  and  in  a 
clear  voice  he  replied  from  the  gallery,  "  No, 
Pa!" 

On  my  first  visit  at  Washington,  I  called  at 
Mr.  Webster's  at  once.  This  must  have  been  in 
1843.  He  was  Secretary  of  State.  I  have  never 
forgotten  the  ease  and  simplicity  with  which,  at 
dinner,  he  kept  the  conversation  on  such  things 
as  would  interest  a  young  man,  and  in  particular 
would  interest  a  person  who  had  just  before  been 
engaged  in  teaching.  He  went  back  to  speak  of 
his  old  days  as  a  schoolmaster,  when,  once  or 
twice,  my  father  had  taken  his  place.  I  had 
spoken  of  my  interest  in  botany,  and  he  began 
talking  about  Linnaeus' s  letters,  with  which  he 
was  quite  familiar,  and  from  which  he  cited  curi 
ous  things.  I,  alas  !  had  never  seen  Linnaeus' s 
letters.  .  Then,  because  I  had  been  a  master  in 
the  Latin  School,  he  brought  the  conversation 
round  to  Thirlwall's  "History of  Greece,"  which  he 
had  read  writh  interest.  Alas  !  I  had  never  read 
Thirlwall's  "  History  of  Greece."  I  do  not  think 
that  there  was  the  least  wish  to  overpower  a 
youngster  in  this ;  it  was  merely  the  ease  with 


36          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

which  he  adapted  himself  to  the  man  whom  he 
was  meeting. 

I  was  afterward  the  very  intimate  friend  of 
George  Jacob  Abbot,  who  was  Mr.  Webster's 
confidential  secretary  when  he  was  Secretary  of 
State  under  Fillmore.  Mr.  Abbot  used  to  say 
that  Mr.  Webster  would  rise  early  in  the  morn 
ing,  light  his  own  fire,  and  work  for  three  hours 
by  himself,  really  finishing  in  that  time  all  the 
business  of  the  day.  He  knew  only  too  well 
that  "  Mr.  Unexpected  "  would  take  the  rest  of 
the  day.  Accordingly,  just  when  they  were  all 
getting  to  their  morning  work  in  the  Department, 
where  the  hours  required  attendance  at  nine 
o'clock,  Mr.  Webster  would  come  in  as  if  he 
were  the  most  unoccupied  man  in  the  world. 
He  would  stand  in  front  of  the  fire  and  say, 
"  Mr.  Abbot,  what  do  you  think  of  Pope's  ren 
dering  of  such  and  such  a  line  in  the <  Iliad '  ? 
Do  you  think  the  Greek  word  bears  this  and 
that?  Send  a  boy  for  the  volume,  and  let  us 
look  at  it  together."  There  was  perhaps  a  pre 
tence  that  he  had  not  been  at  work  at  his  desk 
for  three  hours,  just  as  these  gentlemen  were 
beginning  to  clear  off  the  dockets  which  they 
had  left  over  from  yesterday. 

Strange  to  say,  I  do  not  remember  the  first 


DANIEL   WEBSTER  37 

time  I  ever  heard  Mr.  Webster  speak.  The  first 
time  I  ever  heard  him  speak  in  court  was  in  a 
case  in  the  Supreme  Court  at  Washington,  where 
he  was  counsel  for  the  Girard  heirs  in  an  effort 
which  they  made  to  overthrow  the  Girard  will. 
It  did  not  seem  to  me  that  his  heart  was  much 
in  the  matter.  It  is  in  that  speech  that  he  made 
a  eulogy  on  the  profession  of  a  minister,  which 
was  much  cited  at  that  time.  Girard  had  pro 
vided  in  the  will  that  no  person  who  had  been 
ordained  to  the  ministry  of  religion  should  ever 
be  permitted  inside  the  walls  of  his  building.  In 
fact,  the  arrangement  has  worked  no  harm,  and 
probably  has  done  some  good,  in  the  way  in 
which  Girard  meant  it  should. 

At  that  time  in  Washington  I  used  to  go  and 
hear  Mr.  Webster  whenever  I  could.  I  remem 
ber,  in  another  case  in  the  Supreme  Court,  a 
prophetic  expression  of  scorn  with  which  he  tore 
to  pieces  the  claim  that  something  was  done 
66  under  the  rights  of  police  in  a  certain  city. 
He  said,  what  proved  true  enough,  that  some  of 
us  might  live  to  see  the  time  when  the  imperial 
Nation  should  assert  its  rights  over  all  claims  of 
local  police.  But  the  present  reader  in  1902  must 
remember  that  in  1844  the  word  "  police  "  was 
new,  in  the  sense  in  which  we  use  it,  as,  indeed, 


38          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

the  thing  itself  was  new.  The  word  was  familiar 
enough  as  describing  local  regulations.  But  men 
were  only  beginning  to  understand  how  far  and 
how  often  such  local  regulations  might  claim  to 
take  precedence  of  national  law.  Thus,  in  the 
year  1844,  South  Carolina,  under  a  "police 
regulation,"  was  keeping  all  free  black  men  in 
her  jails,  from  the  time  they  arrived  in  her  sea 
ports  until  the  time  when  their  vessels  sailed 
again. 

I  saw  Mr.  Webster's  power  most  distinctly  on 
the  occasion  of  what  we  still  call  in  Boston  the 
Faneuil  Hall  Speech,  although  he  must  have 
spoken  in  Faneuil  Hall  hundreds  of  times.  The 
Faneuil  Hall  Speech,  among  the  men  of  that  time, 
meant  an  address  of  his  delivered  in  September, 
1841.  I  was  not  then  on  the  staff  of  the  Daily 
Advertiser  properly,  but  it  was  known  that  we 
should  need  the  speech  in  shorthand,  and  there 
were  not  many  shorthand  writers,  so  I  was  drawn 
in  to  do  my  share  of  our  shorthand  report  of  it. 
I  think  this  is  the  report  printed  in  his  works. 
I  had,  of  course,  a  favorable  seat  on  the  plat 
form  at  Faneuil  Hall.  The  occasion  was  one 
of  intense  interest.  The  whole  North  was  com 
mitted  to  the  Whig  party.  That  party  had  suc 
ceeded  in  the  choice  of  Harrison.  Harrison  had 


DANIEL   WEBSTER  39 

died,  and  John  Tyler,  as  weak  a  specimen,  if 
you  except  Franklin  Pierce,  as  ever  was  pushed 
into  a  place  so  important,  had  survived  as  Presi 
dent.  Most  of  the  Cabinet,  including  all  who 
were  supposed  to  be  Mr.  Henry  Clay's  par 
ticular  friends,  withdrew,  but  Mr.  Webster  re 
tained  his  place,  for  reasons  known  to  himself. 
The  whole  body  of  the  Whig  party  was  uneasy 
about  this,  and  would  have  been  glad  to  have 
him  resign.  He  wanted  to  have  some  opportu 
nity  of  meeting  his  friends,  and  the  appointment 
for  this  meeting  had  been  made  in  consequence. 
Men  gathered  from  every  part  of  the  North  to 
hear  this  address.  I  have  often  seen  Faneuil 
Hall  crowded,  but  I  never  saw  it  crowded  as  it 
was  then.  There  was  not  a  seat  in  the  hall ; 
men  were  standing  as  close  as  they  could  be 
packed  ;  they  had  to  have  their  hats  on  because 
there  was  no  place  for  the  stiff  silk  hats  if  they 
had  taken  them  off,  and  I  remember  saying,  as 
we  looked  down,  that  a  bird  could  run  about  on 
the  tops  of  the  hats.  There  was  a  universal  ex 
pectation  that  he  would  outline  his  future  course, 
and  probably  give  instruction  for  the  movement 
of  the  Northern  part  of  the  party.  I  look  back 
to  it,  therefore,  as  a  particular  exertion  of  per 
sonal  power.  He  used,  in  opening,  the  phrase 


40          MEMORIES   OF   A  HUNDRED   YEARS 

which  is  constantly  quoted,  "  When  I  look  down 
upon  this  sea  of  upturned  faces."  He  did  not 
speak  five  minutes  before  he  came  to  what  was 
the  real  nucleus  of  the  address. 

"  If  any  man  comes  here  with  any  expectation 
that  I  shall  make  any  revelation  of  the  policy  of 
the  Administration,  or  of  any  future  action,  he 
will  go  hence  as  wise  as  he  came  here."  This 
in  his  most  solemn  low  tones,  which  people  often 
try  to  imitate  without  any  success.  Then,  paus 
ing  for  a  moment  as  if  to  enjoy  the  surprise  of 
the  assembly,  he  went  on  :  "  This  day's  sun  will 
set,  leaving  me  as  free  to  act  as  duty  calls,  as 
when —  "  and  by  that  time  the  whole  assembly 
was  cheering  with  the  utmost  enthusiasm.  That 
sentence  was  never  finished,  and  this  whole  as 
sembly  of  three  or  four  thousand  men,  some  of 
whom  had  come  a  thousand  miles  to  hear  him, 
were  rapturously  applauding  him  because  he  said 
he  would  not  do  the  very  thing  they  had  ex 
pected  him  to  do  and  wanted  him  to  do. 

It  is  popularly  said,  and  I  suppose  it  is  true, 
that  at  about  that  time  Mr.  Webster  tried  to 
make  the  great  manufacturing  interests  of  the 
North  understand  that  a  breach  was  inevitable 
between  the  North  and  the  South,  and  that  any 
dalliance  with  any  Southern  party  was  no  longer 


DANIEL   WEBSTER  41 

to  be  hoped  for.  It  is  said,  and  I  believe,  that 
Mr.  Webster  would  have  been  glad  then  to  take 
the  lead  at  once  of  the  enthusiasm  of  the  North, 
and  to  unite  the  strong  feeling  latent  in  the 
North  in  some  such  wave  of  indignation  as  united 
it  in  1861.  It  is  said,  and  I  believe,  that  the 
leaders  of  the  manufacturing  interest  failed  him, 
and  that  it  was  with  a  heartsick  feeling  that  he 
returned  to  Washington,  and  that  he  never  had 
any  hearty  personal  enthusiasm  when  he  played 
into  the  hands  of  our  Southern  enemies  in  sup 
porting  the  compromise  measures.  This  is  cer 
tain,  that  the  night  before  he  made  the  speech  of 
March  7,  1850,  such  men  as  Stephen  Phillips,  and 
other  Massachusetts  men  who  were  committed 
to  the  antislavery  feeling  of  the  North,  sup 
posed  that  that  speech  was  to  be  made  in  oppo 
sition  to  the  compromises  which,  in  fact,  Mr. 
Webster  sustained. 

I  do  not  know  that  I  should  have  gone  into 
these  little  personal  reminiscences  but  for  this, 
that  they  give  me  an  opportunity  to  say  one 
thing  which  ought  to  be  said.  Between  the 
years  1826  and  1852,  when  he  died,  I  must 
have  seen  him  thousands  of  times.  I  must  have 
read  thousands  of  letters  from  him.  I  have  been 
I  know  not  how  often  at  his  house.  My  father, 


42          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

as  I  say,  was  his  intimate  friend.  Now,  it  was 
to  me  a  matter  of  the  utmost  personal  surprise 
when  I  found,  gradually  growing  up  in  this 
country,  the  impression  that  Mr.  Webster  was 
often,  not  to  say  generally,  overcome  with  liquor, 
in  the  latter  years  of  his  life.  I  should  say  that 
a  third  part  of  the  anecdotes  of  him  which  you 
find  afloat  now  have  reference  to  occasions  when 
it  was  supposed  that,  under  the  influence  of 
whiskey,  he  did  not  know  what  he  was  doing.  I 
like  to  say,  therefore,  that  in  the  course  of 
twenty-six  years,  running  from  the  time  I  was 
four  years  old  to  the  time  when  I  was  thirty,  I 
never  had  a  dream  or  thought  that  he  cared  any 
thing  about  wine  or  liquor  —  certainly  I  never 
supposed  that  he  used  it  to  excess.  What  is 
more,  I  know  that  my  own  father,  who  lived  to 
the  year  1864,  heard  such  stories  as  these  with 
perfect  disgust  and  indignation.  This  is  a  good 
place  to  print  my  opinion  that  this  class  of  stories 
has  been  nourished,  partly  carelessly  and  partly 
from  worse  motives  ;  and  that  they  are  not  to  be 
taken  as  real  indications  of  the  habit  or  life  of 
the  man. 


THE  HISTORIANS 


CHAPTER   II 
THE   HISTORIANS 

"TT  was  by  rather  a  curious  chance,  as  I  believe, 
-•-  that  a  little  coterie  of  historians  was  brought 
up  in  Boston,  in  the  first  half  of  the  century. 
Dr.  Palfrey,  the  oldest  of  the  company,  called 
my  attention  to  the  circumstances  which  seem 
to  have  led  the  earlier  studies  of  these  men. 

He  himself  was  born  in  Boston,  in  1795.  He 
was  the  successor  of  Edward  Everett  as  the 
minister  of  Brattle  Square  Church,  the  fourth 
in  age  of  the  Boston  Congregational  churches. 
He  afterward  became  Professor  of  Sacred  Lit 
erature  at  Cambridge,  and  a  member  of  Con 
gress.  He  devoted  his  later  years  to  his  history 
of  New  England. 

He  said  to  me  that,  from  two  or  three  causes, 
it  happened  that  the  Public  Libraries  of  Boston 
and  of  the  College  were  especially  strong  in  the 
line  of  history.  He  said  that  on  this  account 
alone  Prescott,  Motley,  and  he  himself  were 
drawn,  almost  without  knowing  it,  into  histori- 

45 


46          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

cal  research.  You  might  almost  say  that  there 
was  nothing  else  they  could  read,  except  the 
Latin  and  Greek  classics.  Bancroft  was  born  in 
Worcester,  studied  at  Cambridge  and  Gottingen, 
and  after  some  years  at  the  Round  Hill  School, 
Northampton,  removed  to  Boston.  Jared  Sparks, 
who  took  to  historical  research  as  a  duck  takes 
to  water,  lived  in  Boston  or  Cambridge  after  he 
left  the  active  ministry  of  the  Unitarian  Church. 

And  what  built  up  these  historical  libraries, 
so  strong  in.  "  Americana  "  even  to  this  day? 

In  1787  Jeremy  Belknap,  who  had  published 
his  "  History  of  New  Hampshire  "  as  early  as 
1784,  came  back  to  Boston,  where  he  was  born. 
With  several  Boston  scholars,  whose  names  are 
not  wholly  forgotten  there,  he  established  the 
Massachusetts  Historical  Society.  The  society 
made  the  first  considerable  public  library,  which 
was  of  course  a  historical  library.  It  is  now  one 
of  the  most  prosperous  Historical  Societies  in  the 
world,  and  its  elegant  library  is  one  of  the  finest 
buildings  in  Boston.  I  am  apt  to  say  that  the 
Dowse  room  is  the  most  elegant  room  in  Boston. 
It  is,  unless  the  Latin  School  parlor  shares  that 
distinction. 


JOHN   GORHAM  PALFREY  47 

JOHN   GORHAM  PALFREY 

Dr.  Palfrey,  then  Mr.  Palfrey,  christened  me 
on  the  19th  of  May,  1822.  I  know  the  date, 
for  I  have  before  me  the  bill  of  the  "hackman" 
who  took  my  father,  my  mother,  and  the  nurse 
who  bore  poor  me  —  six  weeks  old  —  to  the 
church.  Alas !  I  was  counted  as  nothing  in 
the  "  hackman' s "  inventory.  [Mem.  to  out- 
landers  ;  hackman  is  New  Englandese  for  coach 
man,  if  the  coach  be  hired.]  From  that  time 
until  he  died  Dr.  Palfrey  was  a  kind  and 
thoughtful  friend  of  mine,  and,  to  a  generation 
which  does  not  know  him  so  well,  I  like  to  bear 
my  little  tribute  to  his  great  worth.  He  was 
proud  of  his  Massachusetts  descent  from  John 
Palfrey,  one  of  four  pioneers  to  pioneers,  who 
were  in  the  "  Bay  "  even  before  Endicott.  This 
is  all  Greek  to  all  but  the  people  of  the 
Bay.  But  they,  if  they  be  of  true  metal,  under 
stand. 

His  father  was  among  the  early  settlers  of 
New  Orleans,  after  the  purchase  of  Louisiana, 
and  thrived  there.  The  son  lived  a  life  quite 
different  as  minister  of  Brattle  Street  and  pro 
fessor  at  Cambridge.  When  the  father  died,  it 
proved  that  his  plantations  had  many  slaves 


48          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

upon  them.  If  the  property  were  equally 
divided  among  his  children,  forty  or  fifty  of 
these  slaves  would  "  belong  "  to  the  Cambridge 
professor.  The  Louisiana  members  of  the  fam 
ily  knew  that  he  would  not  like  to  own  slaves, 
and  proposed  such  a  division  of  the  property 
that  the  Louisiana  heirs  might  keep  the  slaves, 
and  our  Dr.  Palfrey  receive  something  else. 
No !  He  would  take  his  share,  and  in  1838 
he  went  on  to  New  Orleans,  received  his  living 
chattels,  and  brought  them  on  to  lands  of  free 
dom.  He  placed  them,  as  he  best  could,  with 
people  in  the  West  who  would  take  care  of  them  ; 
but  he  had  a  few  left  with  him  when  he  arrived 
in  Boston. 

This  was  a  practical,  I  might  say  wholesale, 
bit  of  abolition,  at  a  time  when  "  Antislavery," 
so-called,  was  not  popular  in  the  North,  least  of 
all  among  the  people  who  surrounded  Dr.  Palfrey. 
He  had  himself  borne  his  testimony  against  the 
methods  of  Garrison  and  the  other  leaders.  But 
people  believe  in  deeds  more  than  in  words,  and, 
whether  he  was  an  "  Abolitionist "  or  not  in 
paper  definitions,  he  became  a  leader  in  the  coun 
sels  of  the  Free  Soil  people  and  the  Republicans. 
He  was  one  of  the  editors  of  the  Common 
wealth.  His  history  of  New  England  is  called 


JOHN  G.  PALFREY. 
From  a  painting. 


JARED   SPARKS  51 

dull,  perhaps,  but  it  embodies  years  of  hard  work, 
and  no  genuine  New  Englander  is  well  equipped 
unless  he  has  it  at  hand. 

JARED   SPARKS 

Jared  Sparks,  a  Vermont  boy,  was  a  Cambridge 
graduate  of  the  year  1815  at  Harvard  College. 

This  was  at  the  time  when  what  is  called  in 
New  England  the  "  Unitarian  Controversy  "  was 
beginning.  Sparks  had  chosen  the  ministry  for 
his  profession,  and  was  ordained  at  Baltimore  in 
May,  1819.  He  at  once  showed  his  careful  train 
ing  in  a  series  of  volumes  made  up  from  the 
writings  of  the  best  English  writers  for  centuries 
past.  He  was  Chaplain  of  the  National  House 
of  Representatives  in  1821.  His  health  was  not 
sufficient  for  the  duties  of  his  calling,  as  he  esti 
mated  them,  and  he  resigned  the  Baltimore  pul 
pit  in  1823.  He  spent  many  years  in  Europe 
and  in  each  of  the  thirteen  States  in  collecting 
materials  for  the  history  of  the  United  States 
and  the  Life  of  Washington. 

He  afterward  edited  the  American  Almanac 
and  the  North  American  Review.  In  1838  he 
accepted  the  chair  of  History  in  Harvard  College. 

He  became  President  of  the  college  afterward, 
from  1849  to  1853.  As  early  as  the  administra- 


52          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

tion  of  John  Quincy  Adams,  he  was  appointed 
editor  of  the  "  Diplomatic  Correspondence  "  of  the 
country,  that  first  series  which  is  now  invaluable 
to  students.1  My  father  was  a  printer,  and  printed 
one  or  two  volumes  of  the  book ;  and  I  suppose  it 
was  this  which  brought  Mr.  Sparks  to  the  house 
often.  Whatever  was  the  cause,  his  presence 
was  always  a  delight  to  us  children.  While  he 
was  in  the  room,  books  and  slates  and  pencils  and 
paper  were  pushed  away,  that  we  might  hear  him 
talk.  It  seems  to  me  now  that  I  have  never  seen  a 
man's  face  which,  while  strong  and  efficient,  had 
the  same  tokens  of  tenderness.  Powers' s  bust 
gives  some  idea  of  this,  and  seems  to  me  one  of 
the  best  portrait  busts  I  ever  saw. 

He  was  already  collecting  materials  for  his  Life 
of  Washington.  This  meant  that  he  was  going 
from  State  to  State,  and  from  one  capital  in 
western  Europe  to  another,  to  examine,  and,  if 
he  could,  to  collect,  original  documents  as  to  the 
days  of  Washington.  He  picked  up  anecdotes  in 
this  way  which  brought  us,  in  the  thirties  of  the 
lately  defunct  century,  into  quite  close  touch  with 
the  Kevolutionary  days. 

Lafayette  told  Sparks  this  story,  at  La  Grange, 

1  That  edition  was  out  of  print  long  since.  Dr.  Wharton 
edited  the  new  edition. 


JARED    SPARKS  53 

Lafayette's  home,  about  the  year  1828.      Once 
when  he  had  returned  to  France  in  our  Revolu 
tion,  two  young  princes  came  to  see  him,  who 
wanted  to  join  him  here,  really  for  the  frolic  of 
the  adventure.     Lafayette  thought  he  ought  to 
warn  them  that  all  was  not  sunshine  here,  and 
reminded  them  that  they  would  have  to  rough 
it  sometimes.     "  Certainly,  certainly,"  said  one 
of  the  princes.     "  But 
how    little     a     man 
needs  !    With  an  ome 
lette    and   a    dish    of 
soup,  he  has  enough." 
The  young  nobleman 
thus  named,  as  Lafay 
ette  observed,  the  two 
articles  of  diet  which 
at  that  time  could  not 
be  found  in  America 
between    Maine    and 
Georgia.  BusT  OF  JARED  SPABKS. 

When  I  was  in  col 
lege,  Mr.  Sparks  was  appointed  Professor  of 
History.  I  think  he  was  the  first  Professor 
of  History  in  any  American  college,  and  no 
happier  appointment  could  have  been  made 
here,  for  a  new  system.  The  Sparks  profes- 


54          MEMORIES   OF   A  HUNDRED   YEARS 

sorship  was  named  for  a  certain  Mr.  Fisher, 
and  I  am  afraid  that  its  first  service  to  the 
cause  of  history  consists  in  its  preservation  of 
that  gentleman's  memory.  Ours  was  the  first 
class  which  heard  Sparks' s  lectures.  Most  enter 
taining  they  were,  he  had  seen  so  many  of  the 
surviving  actors  of  the  generation  before  his  own. 
At  this  moment,  any  one  who  wants  to  read 
American  history  of  those  times  will  do  well  to 
go  to  Cambridge  and  to  get,  in  some  proper  way, 
permission  to  read  the  Sparks  manuscripts.  A 
key  will  be  given  to  him,  as  erst  to  Bluebeard's 
wife.  Then  he  will  be  directed  to  an  elegant  ma 
hogany  sarcophagus,  modelled,  I  think,  after  the 
tomb  of  Scipio.  Let  him  bravely  open  this  tomb 
and  read.  After  four  or  five  weeks  of  such  joy, 
he  will  know  more  of  some  of  the  heroes  of  the 
Revolution  than  any  one  man  of  their  times  did. 
Dr.  Sparks  employed  a  good  many  under 
graduates 'in  copying  for  him.  I  was  not  one 
of  them,  but  I  knew  them  all.  It  was  to  one 
of  them  that  he  gave  the  golden  rule  for  young 
authors  :  "Read  your  proof  before  you  send  your 
manuscript  to  the  printer."  By  this  he  meant, 
Let  your  manuscript  be  so  perfect  that  no  one 
can  mistake  what  you  want  to  say,  and  that  you 
shall  be  satisfied  when  you  see  yourself  in  type. 


GEORGE  BANCROFT 


55 


Let  young  authors  know  that  this  rule  in 
volves  the  great  art  of  making  yourself  agree 
able  to  editors. 

GEOEGE   BANCROFT 

My  relations 
with  Mr.  Bancroft 
were  intimate  in 
many  of  the  later 
years  of  his  life, 
and  even  from  my 
boyhood  he  was 
very  kind  to  me. 
In  the  summer  of 
1834  I  was  sit 
ting  in  the  parlor, 
reading  aloud  to 
my  mother,  when 
my  father  came 
into  the  room 
smiling  and  said, 
«  Here's  Mr.  Ban 
croft.  The  first 
volume  of  his  his 
tory  is  finished,  and  it  is  to  be  put  to  press."  Mr. 
Bancroft  had  called  to  advise  with  my  father  as 
to  the  printing  of  the  first  volume  of  his  history. 


GEORGE  BANCROFT. 
After  a  photograph  by  Fredricks. 


56  MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

He  was  a  tall,  black-haired  young  man,  quick 
and  active  in  his  movements,  and  smiled  with 
the  same  gracious  smile  which  afterward  for 
more  than  fifty  years  I  knew  so  well.  The 
preface  of  the  first  edition  is  dated  on  the  16th 
of  June,  1834 ;  in  it  he  says :  "  I  have  formed 
the  design  of  writing  a  history  of  the  United 
States,  from  the  discovery  of  the  American  con 
tinent  to  the  present  time."  And  near  the  end 
he  says :  "  The  work  which  I  have  undertaken 
will  necessarily  extend  to  four  or  perhaps  five 
volumes." 

In  fact,  the  work  extended  to  twelve  volumes, 
and  then  came  down  only  to  the  inauguration 
of  George  Washington  as  President. 

Five  years  later,  in  1839,  I  came  to  see  him 
and  know  him  as  I  have  said,  intimately.  He 
had  in  the  meanwhile  removed  his  residence  to 
Boston,  where  he  had  been  appointed  by  Presi 
dent  Van  Buren  Collector  of  the  Customs.  This 
is  one  of  the  truly  serviceable  ways  which  Mr. 
Van  Buren' s  party  discovered  for  showing  their 
appreciation  of  men.  Mr.  Bancroft  had  loyally 
and  courageously  thrown  himself  into  the  Demo 
cratic  balance  while  almost  all  of  his  old  com 
panions,  the  scholars  and  men  of  letters  in  New 
England,  were  opposed  with  the  most  deadly 


GEORGE   BANCROFT  57 

hatred  to  Jackson  and  what  they  called  "his 
crew."  It  proved,  however,  that  Mr.  Bancroft 
was  not  a  bad  man  of  business,  and  afterward, 
as  Secretary  of  the  Navy  under  Mr.  Polk,  he 
showed  capacity  for  administration,  —  for  orig 
inal  administration. 

I  had  enlisted  in  the  service  of  my  native 
town  of  Boston  as  under-teacher  in  her  Latin 
School ;  and,  in  a  very  bright  class  of  boys  who 
were  interesting  to  me,  found  the  two  stepsons 
of  Bancroft,  William  Davis  Bliss,  who  after 
ward  distinguished  himself  at  the  Bar  in  Cali 
fornia,  and  Alexander  Bliss,  who  was  an  active 
soldier  in  the  Civil  War,  and  is  remembered 
with  pleasure  in  Washington,  which  he  made 
his  after  home.  If  I  dared,  I  would  print  here 
Latin  verses  which  the  brothers  Bliss  wrote 
under  my  eye  when  they  were  in  their  teens. 

Mr.  Bancroft  had  an  earnest  and,  I  need  not 
say,  intelligent  interest  in  the  education  of  these 
fine  boys,  and  from  this  interest  it  happened 
that  he  used  to  let  me  walk  with  him  when  he 
took  his  constitutional  after  his  work  was  done. 
In  those  days  people  who  had  but  little  leisure, 
but  who  had  some,  used  to  "walk  around  the 
Common."  This  was  an  almost  standard  "con 
stitutional."  I  remember  one  night,  as  we 


58          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

walked  through  the  Charles  Street  Mall,  the 
moon  rose  just  when  the  sun  was  setting ;  and 
Bancroft  repeated  in  German  Schiller's  fine  lines 
where  he  describes  such  a  moonrise. 

It  is  now  the  fashion  of  the  younger  race  of 
historical  students  to  make  fun  of  Mr.  Bancroft, 
as  if  he  did  not  rise  to  their  heights  or  sink 
to  their  depths,  and  as  if  he  did  not  handle  with 
care  the  original  authorities.  For  this  ridicule 
or  contempt  there  is  really  no  foundation  but 
that  he  does  not  like  to  be  dull,  as  some  men 
do  ;  and  undoubtedly  he  worked  a  good  deal 
over  the  style  of  his  writing.  He  told  me  once 
that  when  he  had  been  digging  among  old 
manuscripts  or  public  documents  he  never  per 
mitted  himself  to  write  until  he  had  read  a  chap 
ter  or  two  of  Gibbon's  "Decline  and  Fall." 
Now,  you  may  be  sure  that  Dr.  Sparks  never 
took  any  such  trouble  as  that,  nor  Richard  Hil- 
dreth.  No  !  nor  dear  Dr.  Palfrey.  Prescott 
did,  and  Motley,  and  Irving,  and  who  will  may 
observe  the  difference.  For  one,  I  am  much 
obliged  to  anybody  who  tries  to  make  it  easy 
for  me  to  read.  According  to  me,  you  might  as 
well  write  with  white  ink  on  white  paper  as 
write  anything  in  a  language  so  dull  that  nobody 
wants  to  read  it. 


GEORGE   BANCROFT  59 

This  is  true,  that  Bancroft  was  an  American 
from  the  end  of  the  whitest  hair  on  his  head 
down  to  the  end  of  the  toe  of  his  winter  arctics. 
He  believed  that  "the  cure  for  the  evils  of 
democracy  is  more  democracy."  1  He  believed 
in  the  government  of  the  people  for  the  people 
by  the  people.  It  was  very  hard,  therefore,  in 
any  special  case  to  persuade  him  that  the  people 
intentionally  did  wrong.  But  he  could  give  way 
to  the  evidence.  And  no  grandson  of  a  Revolu 
tionary  officer  could  cajole  him  or  frighten  him 
into  saying  that  the  grandfather  did  right  on 
some  occasion  when  Bancroft  thought  he  did 
wrong. 

Also,  Mr.  Bancroft  believed  in  God,  and  that 
the  Power  who  makes  for  righteousness  takes 
an  interest  in  human  affairs.  For  instance,  he 
really  believed  that  there  is  a  course  in  history, 
and  that  events  are  not  in  a  state  of  constant 
happening ;  that  there  is  a  divine  element  of 
human  life  in  history,  of  which  a  wise  man, 
though  he  be  only  a  small  arc  in  the  curve  him 
self,  can  know  something  and  can  tell  some 
thing.  I  believe  that  the  fine  exquisites  of  the 
modern  school  have  no  such  faith.  I  believe 
that  they  think  that  events  are  not  events, 

1  Lyman  Abbott's  prescription. 


60          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

that  everything  happens,  and  you  might  as 
well  read  history  from  the  bottom  of  the 
page  to  the  top  as  from  the  top  to  the  bottom. 
Mr.  Bancroft  had  no  such  theory  of  human 
life. 

Here  is  a  little  scrap  from  a  private  note 
which  is  perfectly  characteristic  of  the  man  :  — 

"  Truth  is  the  first  object.  If  you  detected 
any  errors  of  omission  or  commission,  I  hope 
you  will  send  me  the  list  of  them. 

"  And  let  me  ask  if  you  met  with  any  words 
which  offended  you  as  obsolete.  One  of  my 
Eastern  critics,  mixing  up  praise  of  the  book 
for  '  great  vivacity  and  interest,'  adds :  '  I  only 
regret  that  Little  &  Brown  did  not  send  out 
the  glossary  of  obsolete  words,  which  one  re 
quires  almost  as  much  as  in  Chaucer.  These 
blemishes  would  sink  an  ordinary  work.  They 
are  mere  youthful  affectations,  and  will,  I  have 
no  doubt,  disappear  in  the  next  edition/  Tell 
me  candidly  if  this  criticism  has  a  soupqon  of 
justice  to  it.  I  am  not  aware  of  what  gave  rise 
to  it ;  but  if  a  justifying  cause  for  it  exist,  I 
want  to  know  it." 

I  had  called  his  attention  to  his  mistake  in 
his  original  account  of  Bunker  Hill,  in  which  he 
cited  a  despatch  of  Burgoyne's.  I  had  even  told 


GEORGE   BANCROFT  61 

him  that  if  he  had  given  at  the  bottom  of  the 
page  a  reference  to  the  despatch,  he  would  have 
saved  himself  the  mistake.  I  was  at  that  time 
hardly  half  his  age,  and  I  would  not  tell  the 
story  now,  but  to  say  that  to  the  happy  accident 
by  which  I  corrected  a  few  trifling  errors  like 
this  I  owed  the  flow  of  a  stream  of  friendship 
which  I  constantly  enjoyed  for  all  the  rest  of  his 
life. 

Mr.  Bancroft  from  the  first  to  the  last  was 
most  generous  in  giving  the  use  of  his  invalu 
able  records  to  any  one  who  wanted  them.  In 
Europe  he  had  collected  manuscripts  which  were 
simply  priceless.  One  is  glad  to  say  that  now 
they  are  the  property  of  the  Lenox  Library,  and 
anybody  who  is  at  work  on  any  historical  sub 
ject  may  go  into  that  matchless  library  of  his 
and  work  an  hour,  or  a  day,  or  a  week,  as  he 
likes. 

I  never  heard  Mr.  Bancroft  speak  with  regret 
of  his  inability  to  bring  up  his  history  to  the 
period  in  which  he  was  writing.  As  I  have  said, 
the  preface  to  the  first  volume,  in  the  first  edi 
tion,  expresses  his  hope  that  in  five  volumes  he 
should  bring  up  the  history  "  to  the  present 
time."  The  present  time  was  1833.  In  fact, 
the  twelve  volumes  of  the  history  come  to  the 


62          MEMORIES   OF   A  HUNDRED   YEARS 

adoption  of  the  Federal  Constitution.  We  who 
were  younger  used  to  laugh  about  his  slow  prog 
ress,  though  I  do  not  remember  that  I  ever  dared 
call  his  attention  to  it.  But,  in  fact,  the  great 
critical  volume,  the  volume  on  the  outbreak  of 
the  American  Revolution,  while  it  covers  but 
eighteen  months  of  history,  was  four  years  later 
in  date  than  the  volume  which  preceded  it ;  and 
among  ourselves  we  used  to  say  that  this  fortune 
was  like  that  of  the  frog  who  hopped  up  two 
feet  every  day  in  the  well  which  was  his  prison 
and  fell  down  three  feet  every  night. 

But,  in  truth,  it  is  quite  as  well  that  Mr.  Ban 
croft's  attention  should  have  been  concentrated 
on  the  years  to  which  he  gave  his  life  as  a  his 
torian.  Alas,  we  know  so  little  of  what  passes 
in  our  own  time !  And  Mr.  Adams,  with  the 
resources  open  to  him,  has  been  able  to  write  for 
us  a  much  better  history  of  the  reigns  of  Jeffer 
son  and  Madison  than  Mr.  Bancroft  could  have 
done  twenty  years  before,  with  the  resources 
open  to  him.  Here  I  speak  with  some  personal 
feeling.  In  the  spring  of  the  year  1880  I  re 
ceived  from  the  editors  of  Bryant  and  Gay's  His 
tory  a  somewhat  urgent  appeal,  begging  me  to 
write  at  once  for  them  their  chapters  covering 
the  period  from  1801  to  1812,  because  there  had 


GEORGE   BANCROFT  63 

been  a  mistake  in  the  arrangements  for  that 
history.  It  is  one  of  the  admirable  com 
posite  histories  invented  in  our  later  times,  in 
which  the  different  chapters  are  confided  to  dif 
ferent  hands.  In  the  very  short  time  assigned 
to  me  I  did  the  best  I  could ;  and,  as  poor  Pilate 
said,  "  what  is  written  is  written."  But  as  soon 
as  I  had  the  good  fortune  to  read  Mr.  Adams's 
volumes,  I  had  the  regret,  I.  will  not  say  the 
mortification,  to  see  that  about  half  of  what  I 
had  written  was  all  wrong.  I  had  taken  the 
outside  view,  that  which  men  chose  to  print 
in  newspapers  and  public  documents.  Now,  in 
the  cabinets  which  had  been  thrown  open  to 
Mr.  Adams  in  England,  in  France,  and  in 
Washington,  he  had  the  daily  photograph,  the 
snap-shots,  which  reveal  the  inner  motives  of 
the  men  who  acted. 

Mr.  Bancroft  was  quite  sure  that  it  was  he 
who  made  James  Knox  Polk  President  of  the 
United  States ;  and  to  the  last  he  thought  that 
he  did  the  country  great  service  by  doing  so. 
Indeed,  it  was  a  little  curious  to  me  to  see  that 
a  man  of  his  wide  sweep  —  a  man  who  was 
accustomed  to  generalize  very  freely  —  could 
persuade  himself  that  Mr.  Polk  was  an  impor 
tant  person  in  any  way;  or,  indeed,  that  his 


64          MEMORIES   OF   A  HUNDRED   YEARS 

election  was  anything  but  a  misfortune  to  the 
country.  All  the  same,  Mr.  Bancroft  did  think 
so,  and  he  would  tell  the  story  of  the  crisis  in 
the  nominating  Convention,  in  which  he  in 
troduced  Mr.  Polk  —  a  "dark  horse"  —  and 
rallied  to  this  new  banner  the  support  of  both 
factions,  which  had  been  in  contention  in  the 
Democratic  Convention.  What  followed,  natu 
rally  enough,  was  a  close  and  cordial  intimacy 
between  him  and  Mr.  Polk,  in  whose  Cabinet 
Mr.  Bancroft  was  Secretary  of  the  Navy.  And 
I  feel  sure  that  he  told  me  that,  at  Mrs.  Polk's 
request,  he  had  prepared,  or  was  preparing,  a 
life  of  Mr.  Polk.  This,  I  think,  has  never  been 
published.  He  showed  me  Mr.  Polk's  very  full 
diary,  written  out  neatly  and  elegantly,  which 
will  one  day  come  to  light,  with  some  very  curi 
ous  views,  I  fancy,  on  the  politics  of  the  time. 

There  is  an  anecdote  of  the  day,  worth  quot 
ing,  that  when  Henry  Clay,  who  was  the  oppo 
sition  candidate,  received  the  news  of  Mr.  Polk's 
nomination,  he  said,  with  an  oath,  "  Beat  again ! 
A  new  man !  "  In  truth  the  election  was  very 
close.  The  defection  of  the  Liberty  party  in 
New  York  to  Mr.  Birney  lost  the  State  of  New 
York  to  Mr.  Clay,  and  Mr.  Polk  was  chosen. 

I  like  to  remember  my  visits  at  Newport  to 


GEORGE   BANCROFT  65 

Mr.  Bancroft  in  his  beautiful  summer  home. 
We  may  say  what  we  choose  about  fashion, 
but  fashion  is  apt  to  choose  well  in  its  choice 
of  its  resorts.  At  Newport  you  have  what  for 
northern  climates  is  to  be  called  the  kingdom 
of  heaven  upon  earth,  so  far  as  physical  condi 
tions  go  —  that  is  to  say,  you  have  your  south 
wind  off  the  sea.  And  at  Newport  one  does 
not  wonder  that  the  hardly  pressed  Algonquin 
aborigines  of  New  England  conceived  of  heaven 
as  a  region  in  the  southwest. 

One  of  the  pleasantest  nooks  of  the  eastern 
side  of  Newport  was  Mr.  Bancroft's  summer 
home,  and  here  he  had  his  roses.  He  was  no 
mere  dabster  or  amateur  about  roses,  to  go  out 
in  the  morning  and  snip  off  some  beautiful 
blossoms,  of  whose  birth  and  growth  he  knew 
nothing.  He  was  really  a  fellow-worker  with 
God  in  bringing  those  roses  to  their  perfec 
tion.  Now,  a  perfect  rose  is  the  most  exqui 
site  visible  symbol  which  we  have  of  what  hap 
pens  when  man  the  child  works  with  God  the 
Father,  and  when  together  they  bring  about 
what  they  are  working  for.  It  is  therefore, 
always  a  pleasure  to  recollect  that  Bancroft  and 
Francis  Parkman,  in  the  midst  of  their  hard 
work  that  we  might  know  something,  had  heart 

VOL.'lI.  --F 


66          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDREIT  YEARS 

and  time  and  insight  and  inspiration  and  deter 
mination  and  courage  enough  to  help  the  world 
forward  in  the  creation  of  perfect  roses. 

EICHAED   HILDRETH 

The  country  owes  a  great  deal  to  the  diligence 
with  which  Richard  Hildreth  collected  the  mate 
rials  for  his  history  of  the  United  States,  pub 
lished  between  the  years  1849  and  1856.  But 
the  book  has  never  been  what  is  called  a  popular 
book.  It  is  one  instance  more  of  the  failure  of  a 
brilliant  story-teller  when  he  comes  down  to  hard- 
pan,  as  the  ungodly  say,  and  has  to  address  him 
self  to  the  business  of  narrative  where  he  is,  so 
to  speak,  chained  by  his  facts. 

As  early  as  1836  Mr.  Hildreth  wrote  a  very 
brilliant  novel,  "Archy  Moore,  or  the  White 
Slave."  In  Mr.  Howells's  "  Reminiscences " 
he  has  told  us  the  impression,  that  that  book 
made  on  him  even  in  his  boyhood.  If  anybody 
chose  to  look  up  my  college  themes,  he  would 
find  my  review  of  the  book  written  at  the 
time  it  was  printed. 

But  Mr.  Hildreth,  like  so  many  other  men 
who  hold  a  light  pen,  was  chained  to  the 
galley  oar  of  journalism  through  the  greater 
part  of  his  literary  life. 


RICHARD   HILDRETH 


67 


He  lived  in  Boston,  and  I  should  have  known 
him  personally,  but  that  he  was  the  editor  of  the 
Atlas,  which  was  the  rival  daily  to  the  Adver 
tiser,  which  was  in  our  family. 

When  the  novelist  Smollett  was  set  to  the 
job  of  writing  the 
history  of  Eng 
land,  he  made 
one  of  the  stupid 
est  books  which 
it  has  been  the 
duty  of  people 
after  ward  to  read. 
Walter  Scott  did 
not  fare  much 
better  when  he 
wrote  the  "  Life 
of  Napoleon." 
Mr.  Hildreth's 
book  is  much 

more  readable  than  either  of  these,  but  it 
carries  with  it  the  fault  that  it  is  written  while 
many  of  the  men  are  alive  whose  work  is 
to  be  explained,  and  the  secrets  are  not  un 
locked  which  they  have  taken  care  to  guard. 
At  this  moment  we  know  a  great  deal  more 
of  the  history  of  the  Revolution,  one  hundred 


RICHARD  HILDRETH. 


68          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

and  twenty-five  years  ago,  than  Washington 
or  Franklin  or  John  Adams  knew.  They 
knew  some  things  that  we  do  not  know  and 
nobody  ever  will  know;  but  we  know  many 
more  which  were  hidden  from  them.  Men  in 
political  life  are  specially  disposed  to  "cover 
their  tracks  "  as  the  slang  phrase  has  it.  They 
keep  a  great  deal  concealed.  "Argus-eyed 
press "  tries  to  make  us  believe  that  it  sees 
everything;  but  it  does  not  see  everything. 
Indeed  it  sees  curiously  little.  And  a  history 
made  from  newspapers  alone  is  a  very  poor 
history. 

For  this  reason  Mr.  Hildreth's  History,  like 
many  other  books  of  good  authority  which 
could  be  named,  presents  itself  to  the  reader 
as  a  digest  of  public  documents,  and  we  do 
not  get  the  local  color,  or  what  the  artists 
like  to  call  the  broken  lights  of  the  fore 
ground. 

WILLIAM  HICKLING  PRESCOTT 

I  must  not  say  that  my  own  relations  with 
Mr.  Prescott  were  intimate,  but  they  were 
cordial.  Mr.  Prescott,  like  Mr.  Bancroft,  had 
no  jealousies,  and  always  did  a  favor  to  another 
student  if  he  could. 


WILLIAM   HICKLING   PRESCOTT 


69 


Of  one  of  such  favors  I  enjoyed  the  results, 
in  a  droll  way,  long  after  his  death. 

I  was  a  youngster  in  my  last  year  in  college, 
when  the  President,  Josiah  Quincy,  sent  for  me. 
He   said,   very  pleasantly,   that   he   thought   I 
should    like    after 
I   left    college    to 
earn  my  own  liv 
ing  ;  or,  as  he  put 
it,     to     be     inde 
pendent     of     my 
father  in  matters 
of  money.     I  said 
that  that  was  cer-  x 
tainly    my    wish. 
Then  he  said  that 
Mr.    Prescott  had 
told  him  he  might 
offer  me  the  posi 
tion  of  his  reader 


WILLIAM  H.  PRESCOTT. 

From  a  stipple  engraving. 


proposal  which  I  received  with  joy.  As  the 
reader  probably  knows,  Prescott  was  nearly 
blind.  In  some  college  foolery  in  commons 
some  one  struck  his  eye  with  a  heavy  crust  of 
bread  and  wounded  it  so  that,  for  the  purposes 
of  reading,  both  of  his  eyes  were  eventually 


70          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

useless.  One  likes  to  say  in  parenthesis  that 
Prescott  would  never  tell  the  name  of  the  fool 
by  whose  carelessness  he  lost  his  sight. 

Now,  Prescott  had  finished  his  "Ferdinand 
and  Isabella"  with  only  such  aid  in  reading 
and  writing  as  he  had  from  an  assistant  who 
did  not  know  the  Spanish  language.  This  man 
did  not  even  take  the  pains  to  acquire  the 
very  simple  rules  for  its  pronunciation,  and 
he  read  the  Spanish  words  to  Mr.  Prescott  as 
if  they  were  English.  When,  in  the  winter 
of  1838-1839,  Prescott  was  well  at  work  on 
his  Cortes,  he  determined  to  have  a  reader  who 
could  understand  and  pronounce  Spanish,  and 
had  permitted  Mr.  Quincy  to  ask  me  to  fill  the 
place.  As  I  have  said,  I  was  delighted,  and  I 
said  so.  So  I  went  to  see  Mr.  Prescott,  who  was 
kindness  itself  and  engaged  me.  I  had  to  confess 
that  I  did  not  read  Spanish,  but  I  told  him  I  would 
get  it  up  at  once,  and  in  fact  I  went  to  dear 
old  Francis  Sales,  the  Spanish  teacher  at  Cam 
bridge,  and  entered  with  him  as  a  special  student. 

But,  alas  and  alas !  that  happy  week  wTas  not 
over  before  I  received  a  courteous  note  from  Mr. 
Prescott  to  say  that  he  found  that  a  friend  of 
his  had  definitely  offered  the  place  of  reader  to 
another  person,  and  that  this  young  gentleman 


WILLIAM   HICKLING   PRESCOTT  71 

had  accepted  it.  There  was  nothing  for  me  but 
to  bear  my  disappointment  and  to  give  np  my 
hopes  of  seeing  the  Cortes  in  my  own  handwrit 
ing.  Prescott  was  most  kind  and  thoughtful  in 
the  whole  business. 


PRESCOTT'S  HOME  AT  PEPPERELL,  MASS. 
From  an  engraving  by  J.  Kirk. 

Now  see  what  followed.  Forty-three  years 
after,  I  was  in  Madrid.  I  had  gone  there  to 
make  some  studies  and  collect  some  books  for 
the  history  of  the  Pacific,  which,  with  a  pro 
phetic  instinct,  I  have  always  wanted  to  write. 
Different  friends  gave  me  letters  of  introduc 
tion,  and  among  others  the  gentlemen  of  the 
Spanish  Embassy  here  were  very  kind  to  me. 


72          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

They  gave  me  four  such  letters,  and  when  I 
was  in  Madrid  and  when  I  was  in  Seville  it 
seemed  as  though  every  door  flew  open  for 
me  and  every  facility  was  offered  me. 

It  was  not  until  I  was  at  home  again  that  I 
came  to  know  the  secret  of  these  most  diligent 
civilities.  I  still  had  one  of  my  Embassy  letters 
which  I  had  never  presented.  I  read  it  for 
the  first  time,  to  learn  that  I  was  the  coadju 
tor  and  friend  of  the  great  historian  Prescott 
through  all  his  life,  that  I  was  his  assistant 
through  all  his  historical  work,  and,  indeed, 
for  these  reasons,  no  American  was  more 
worthy  of  the  consideration  of  the  gentle 
men  in  charge  of  the  Spanish  archives.  It 
was  certainly  by  no  fault  of  mine  that  an 
exaggeration  so  stupendous  had  found  its  way 
to  the  Spanish  Legation.  Somebody  had  said, 
what  was  true,  that  Prescott  was  always  good 
to  me,  and  that  our  friendship  began  when  he 
engaged  me  as  his  reader.  And,  what  with 
translating  this  simple  story,  what  with  peo 
ple's  listening  rather  carelessly  and  remember 
ing  rather  carelessly,  by  the  time  my  letters 
were  drafted  I  had  become  a  sort  of  "double" 
of  Mr.  Prescott  himself.  I  hope  that  I  shall 
never  hear  that  I  disgraced  him. 


WASHINGTON   IRVING 


73 


WASHINGTON  IRVING 

Washington  Irving  is  the  senior  in  the  group 
of  the  American  historians.  He  was  one  year 
older  than  my  father. 
I  might  have  known 
him  earlier  and  better 
than  I  did  but  for  an 
unfortunate  fit  of  mod 
esty,  such  as  belongs, 
perhaps,  to  a  man's 
twentieth  year.  In  the 
summer  of  1840  I  had 
escaped  from  the  daily 
duty  of  school-keeping, 
and  four  of  us  highly 
determined  that  we 

WOuld  take  OUr  Vacation  WASHINGTON  IRVING. 

i  .1  ^  Painted  by  D.  Wilkie  at  Seville, 

in  what  was  then  a  long  April  2a,  1328. 

journey  —  I    think    to 

each  of  us  the  longest  of  our  lives.  We  were 
to  go  to  New  York  by  the  route  through  the 
Sound,  we  were  to  go  up  the  North  River  to 
Catskill  and  West  Point,  and  then  from  Al 
bany  we  were  to  go  by  stage-coach  to  Spring 
field,  and  so  by  Springfield  to  Boston.  Let  the 
economical  reader  observe  that  my  father,  hav- 


74          MEMORIES   OF   A  HUNDRED   YEARS 

ing  built  the  railway  from  Boston  to  Springfield, 
could  give  us  free  passes  home.  I  remember  my 
brother  said  of  the  journey  that  we  spent  Sun 
day  in  Springfield  because  we  had  nothing  else 
to  spend  there. 

This  is  too  long  a  preface,  but  it  may  stand 
as  explaining  how  I  came  to  be  in  New  York 
for  the  first  time,  and,  in  a  fashion,  why  I  did 
not  see  Irving  while  I  was  there.  My  dear 
uncle  Alexander  Everett  had  been  good  enough 
to  give  me  a  cordial  note  of  introduction  to 
Bryant,  who  was  editing  the  Evening  Post  in 
New  York,  and  one  to  Irving,  who  was  liv 
ing  at  Tarrytown.  When  we  came  to  New 
York  my  courage  failed  me,  and  I  did  not 
dare  go  to  see  Bryant.  I  knew,  of  course,  that 
I  could  give  him  no  pleasure ;  I  knew  also  that 
I  should  take  something  of  his  time ;  and  I  kept 
the  letter,  not  to  present  it  to  him  until  twenty- 
five  years  had  gone  by. 

As  to  Irving,  just  the  same  difficulties  pre 
sented  themselves.  The  letter  to  Irving  re 
mained  unused  from  1840  to  1859.  In  that 
year  I  "made  my  first  visit  to  Niagara,  and, 
by  way  of  picking  up  a  dropped  stitch,  I 
went  round  by  New  York  and  the  Hudson 
and  stopped  at  Tarrytown,  provided  with  the 


WASHINGTON   IRVING  75 

letter  of  introduction,  now  eighteen  years  old, 
and  with  another  one  given  me  by  Edward 
Everett.  Irving  was  cordiality  itself  in  his 
welcome  of  me  and  of  a  young  friend  who 
was  my  fellow-traveller.  He  showed  us  the 
places  of  historical  interest  around  his  beau 
tiful  Sunny  side,  and,  best  of  all,  he  talked 
with  the  greatest  freedom  of  his  work  in 
history.  I  pleased  him  by  telling  him  with 
how  much  pleasure  I  was  reading  aloud  at 
home  the  closing  volume  of  his  "  Life  of 
Washington,"  and  I  said  that  he  had  the 
power,  which  few  people  have,  of  giving  to 
diplomacy  and  matters  of  state  the  interest 
which  is  supposed  to  belong  to  adventure  and 
to  battle.  This  pleased  him,  and  I  remember 
he  said  that  "  rub-a-dub  and  roro-toro "  were 
more  apt  to  catch  the  ear  than  more  quiet 
discussions  of  the  Cabinet  and  of  the  Senate. 

Irving' s  relation  to  the  literature  of  the  coun 
try,  and  especially  to  its  historical  literature, 
make  a  very  important  part  of  any  connected 
history  of  the  century.  His  welcome  to  me 
in  1859  was  an  echo  from  a  former  genera 
tion.  He  had  been  living  in  London  for  a  year 
or  more  when  Alexander  Everett  wrote  him 
from  Madrid  that  Navarette's  book  on  the 


76          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED    YEARS 

original  Columbus  papers  had  been  published, 
and  that  it  would  be  a  good  thing  if  he  would 
translate  it  or  otherwise  prepare  it  for  American 
readers.  Irving  was  well  pleased  at  the  sug 
gestion,  and  came  to  Madrid,  where  Mr.  Ever 
ett  considered  him  as  a  Secretary  of  Legation, 
and  there  in  that  charming  Spanish  home  Irv 
ing' s  career  as  a  historian  began. 

MOTLEY   AND  PAKKMAN 

To  return  to  Boston,  certainly  it  is  unusual 
that  a  little  community,  such  as  ours  here,  in  the 
years  between  1810  and  1850,  should  have  edu 
cated  a  group  of  historians  like  Palfrey,  Prescott, 
Motley,  Parkman,  and  Higginson.  The  remark 
with  which  I  began  this  chapter,  is  to  be  taken 
into  account ;  I  think  that  one  has  a  right 
to  say  that  the  romance  or  picturesqueness  of 
our  early  history  in  "  the  Bay  "  is  to  be  consid 
ered  also.  In  a  way,  you  might  say  that  all  five 
of  these  men  were  educated  in  the  same  way, 
they  were  fitted  for  Harvard  College  in  the 
Boston  Schools,  or  the  schools  of  the  neighbor 
ing  villages.  Prescott  graduated  seventeen 
years  before  Motley ;  and  Motley,  only  seventeen 
years  old,  graduated  thirteen  years  before  Park 
man.  As  one  of  the  little  company  who  are 


MOTLEY   AND    PARKMAN  77 

left  of  Professor  Edward  Tyrrel  Channing's  boys 
at  Cambridge,  it  is  a  pleasure  to  me  to  say  that 
he  taught  Motley  and  Parkman  how  to  write 
English.  This  reader  does  not  know  that  we 
old  stagers  think  that  if  you  give  us  one  hundred 
pages  of  Harvard  College  nineteenth-century  Eng 
lish,  we  can  tell  whether  it  were  written  by  men 
who  graduated  before  1850,  when  Channing 
withdrew  from  his  professorship,  or  after. 

Miss  Sullivan  said  of  our  dear  Helen  Keller, 
when  she  was  asked  why  Helen  Keller  wrote 
better  English  than  the  group  of  other  people 
who  were  in  correspondence  with  her,  "  You  for 
get  that  Helen  never  read  any  bad  English." 
Motley  and  Parkman,  heaven  knows,  had  occa 
sions  enough  to  read  bad  English  and  bad  French 
and  bad  Dutch- and  bad  Algonquin:  but  some 
guardian  genius  or  other,  may  I  not  say  Edward 
Tyrrel  Channing  or  his  spirit  ?  brooded  over 
them,  and  the  good  English  is  there,  as  it  is  in 
what  Higginson  writes,  as  it  was  in  what  Emer 
son  and  Lowell  and  Holmes  wrote. 

When  Mr.  Webster  and  the  short-lived  Har 
rison  dynasty  came  in,  there  was  a  chance  to 
appoint  such  men  as  Motley  to  posts  abroad; 
and  he  became,  in  1841,  Secretary  of  Legation 
at  St.  Petersburg.  But  he  remained  there  only 


78          MEMORIES   OF   A  HUNDRED   YEARS 

eight  months,  and  returned  to  America,  not  to 
enter  the  diplomatic  service  again  until  he  was 
appointed  to  Vienna  at  the  beginning  of  the 
Civil  War.  Charles  Sunnier  told  me  once,  that 
when  Lincoln  was  making  up  his  first  lists  of 
appointments,  he  affected  to  be  a  little  annoyed 
by  the  pressure  which  New  England,  and  espe 
cially  Massachusetts,  brought  to  bear.  To  tell 
the  truth,  we  had  some  men  in  Massachusetts 
of  whom  we  need  not  be  ashamed,  and  one  of 
them,  Charles  Francis  Adams,  was  appointed 
to  London,  and  another,  John  Lothrop  Motley, 
to  Vienna,  two  of  the  principal  foreign  appoint 
ments  given  to  so  small  a  State.  When  the  last 
of  these  principal  nominations  was  made,  Lincoln 
said  to  Sumner,  "  Now,  Mr.  Sumner,  I  hope  you 
will  give  me  a  little  time  before  I  hear  from 
Massachusetts  again."  This  was  only  a  few 
days,  however,  before  the  19th  of  April,  1861, 
when  Sumner  and  Lincoln  were  together  at  the 
White  House,  and  it  was  announced  that  the 
Sixth  Massachusetts  Regiment  had  fought  its 
way  through  Baltimore,  and  was  at  the  moment 
placed  in  garrison  at  the  Capitol.  Sumner  said 
to  Lincoln,  with  some  satisfaction,  "  Mr.  Presi 
dent,  you  are  glad  to  hear  from  Massachusetts 
to-day." 


MOTLEY  AND   PARKMAN  79 

I  might  attempt  to  review  in  a  few  lines  the 
preposterous  intrigues  which  made  Motley  throw 
up  his  appointment  at  Vienna,  but  I  do  not, 
partly  because  it  is  a  pity  to  remember  them, 
and  again,  because  the  whole  story  has  been 
admirably  told  by  Dr.  Holmes.  As  a  diplo 
matist  in  England,  he  was  honored  and  beloved. 
He  was  fortunate,  in  that  he  had  been  acquainted 
somewhat  intimately  with  Bismarck,  when  he 
was  in  Gottingen,  in  college.  Let  the  reader 
recollect  that  as  late  as  1861  Prince  Bismarck 
was  so  little  known  by  the  average  American 
that  his  name  was  not  included  in  Appleton's 
"  Cyclopedia,"  the  B  volume  of  which  was 
printed  in  that  year.  I  have  been  amused  and 
half  provoked  to  find  in  some  of  the  machine- 
made  biographies  of  Motley,  that  his  "  History 
of  the  Dutch  Republic,"  one  of  the  world's  stand 
ard  histories  to-day,  was  written  as  if  by  acci 
dent.  It  is  told  as  if  he  drank  his  cup  of  coffee 
in  the  morning,  and  said,  "  What  would  you  do 
to-day  ?  "  and  somebody  asked,  "  Why  not  write 
a  history  of  the  Dutch  Republic  ?  "  and  he  said, 
"  I  think  I  will."  The  truth  is,  that  he  had 
been  studying  it  for  years ;  and  when  Prescott 
approached  that  subject,  in  the  series  of  his 
histories,  Motley  explained  to  him  how  much 


80  MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

time  and  effort  he  had  given  to  it,  and  placed 
himself  and  his  material  wholly  at  Prescott's 
disposal. 

Holmes  told  me  with  the  greatest  pleasure 
once  that  Motley  told  him  that  two  lines  of 
Holmes' s  had  been  to  him  an  inspiration  and  a 
direction.  Motley  had  been  living  with  his  wife 
and  his  little  children  in  one  place  and  another 
in  the  Netherlands,  so  that  he  might  read  these 
time-stained  manuscripts  in  crabbed  Dutch,  in 
preparation  for  his  history.  You  might  say  that 
nobody  in  the  world  cared  for  it.  His  old  friends 
even  wondered  why  he  exiled  himself.  Dutch ! 
Why  should  a  man  like  Motley  bother  himself 
about  Dutch !  There  and  thus  came  the 
moments  of  depression  and  discouragement. 
Holmes  said  that  Motley  told  him  that  once 
when  he  was  all  worn  out  in  his  work,  these  two 
lines  braced  him  up  and  helped  him  through, 

"  Stick  to  your  aim ;  the  mongrel's  hold  will  slip, 
But  only  crowbars  loose  the  bulldog's  grip." 

Holmes's  very  careful  study  of  Motley's  life, 
printed  first  in  the  Transactions  of  the  Massachu 
setts  Historical  Society,  is  a  book  which  will  do 
no  end  of  good  to  those  young  people,  of  whom 
there  are  none  too  many,  to  whom  the  literary 
career  is  something  serious. 


FRANCIS    PARKMAN  81 

Motley  was  a  through  and  through  American. 
There  are  some  very  interesting  reminiscences, 
some  of  which  are  written  by  Howells,  who  was 
our  Consul-general  in  the  Adriatic  when  Motley 
was  at  Vienna.  I  always  recollect,  with  a  cer 
tain  amusement,  the  half  despair  and  half  fun 
with  which  he  spoke  to  me  just  before  he  sailed 
for  Europe  in  1858.  I  met  him  and  said  to  him, 
"  Really,  you  give  us  very  little  time  here."  And 
he  said :  "  Well,  you  have  nothing  in  Boston  for  a 
man  of  leisure.  I  thought  I  should  enjoy  a  few 
months  of  leisure  after  my  work  in  Holland,  but 
you  will  have  to  hang  up  in  the  harbor,  across 
the  channel  between  Fort  Independence  and 
Castle  Winthrop,  a  banner  which  shall  be  in 
scribed  with  Boston's  motto,  'No  admittance 
except  on  business.'  ' 

FRANCIS   PARKMAN 

Francis  Parkman  entered  college  just  after  I 
left  it.  The  memoranda,  only  too  brief,  in  Mr. 
Farnham's  charming  life,  show  how  early  his 
heart  was  set  on  the  career  which  has  proved  so 
fortunate  to  his  country  and  the  world.  "  We 
see  Parkman  as  a  child,  from  eight  to  thirteen 
years  of  age,  living  on  his  grandfather's  farm  at 
Medford,  where  he  developed  his  love  of  nature 


VOL.  II.  — G 


82          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

by  roaming  in  the  woods  of  the  Middlesex  Fells." 
When  a  college  student  he  followed  on  foot  the 
route  of  Rogers  from  Lake  Memphremagog  to 
the  Connecticut. 

He  was  one  of  the  first  travellers  to  see  Craw 
ford's  mountain  house,  at  Mt.  Washington,  in 
1841,  having  ridden  up,  on  Tom  Crawford's 
bridle  path.  He  went  to  Maine  to  study  the 
Indians  near  Bangor  and  to  collect  traditions 
of  their  wars  with  the  Mohawks ;  and  as  early 
as  1842  he  was  mistaken  for  an  Indian  while 
at  supper  in  a  country  tavern,  in  Cambridge, 
Vermont.  It  was  as  early  as  1846  that  he  made 
his  home  for  the  summer  with  a  party  of 
Ogilallah  Indians  in  that  experience  so  invalu 
able  to  him  afterward  which  he  has  described 
in  the  "Oregon  Trail." 

Such  are  perhaps  sufficient  illustrations  of  his 
determination  to  know  what  he  is  talking  about 
when  he  writes  history.  He  belongs  to  the  real 
ists  of  our  century.  Walter  Scott  did  not  choose 
to  put  lilies  and  roses  into  his  poetry,  but  chose 
to  name  the  weeds  which  the  country  people 
picked  upon  the  hillsides.  Parkman  did  not 
choose  to  describe  the  Indian  march  or  the  Ind 
ian  village  until  he  had  tramped  in  one  or  lived 
in  the  other.  And  this  will  be  found  to  be  the 


FKANCIS   PARKMAN  83 

distinction  between  the  school  of  history  of  to 
day  and  that  of  the  Humes,  the  Smolletts,  the 
Gibbons  and  Mitfords.  If  anybody  cares,  it  is 
this  which  makes  the  histories  written  in  the 
last  half  century  so  much  more  entertaining  than 
those  written  a  hundred  years  before. 

I  lived  too  near  to  him  to  maintain  any  exten 
sive  correspondence  with  him.  If  I  wanted  to 
know  anything,  I  asked  him  and  he  told  me.  I 
like  to  remember  him  as  I  saw  him  on  the  last 
day  I  ever  spoke  with  him.  He  was  an  enthu 
siastic  lover  of  flowers  and  he  was  sitting  on  a 
little  walking  stool  which  he  carried  with  him 
in  his  garden,  because  he  could  not  stand  easily 
for  any  length  of  time.  And  we  talked  not  of 
the  Algonquin  language,  but  of  the  flowers  which 
he  had  brought  into  being  by  his  own  care. 
His  name  survives  in  the  Lilium  Parkmanii,  a 
Japanese  lily  which  by  cultivation  is  magnified 
into  such  enormous  size  that  an  Englishman 
bought  it  for  one  thousand  dollars  in  1876.  He 
also  brought  out  new  varieties  of  other  flowers. 
The  Bussey  Institute  published  a  list  of  the 
flowers  of  all  sorts  in  his  garden  in  Bulletin 
No.  15. 

From  my  own  autograph  book  I  copy  one 
note.  When  I  wrote  my  history  of  Kansas  and 


84          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

Nebraska,  he  was  one  of  the  handful  of  white 
men  who  had  ever  seen  the  valley  of  the  La 
Platte.  I  wrote  to  him  to  inquire  about  the 
wood  which  could  be  used  by  emigrants.  This 
is  his  reply  :  — 

July  28,  1854. 

"  It  is  so  long  since  I  was  in  the  country  to 
which  you  refer,  that  my  recollection  of  it  is  a 
little  faded.  I  crossed  the  Black  Range  twice, 
at  different  points,  within  fifty  miles  south  of  the 
North  Fork  of  the  Platte,  and  penetrated  it  else 
where  within  the  same  limits.  The  chief  growth 
is  cottonwood  and  poplars;  but  there  are  pines 
and  firs  of  very  considerable  size,  though  not 
in  great  number.  In  some  of  the  valleys  and 
gorges  there  is  a  thick  growth  of  tall  and  slen 
der  spruces.  No  walnut  is  found.  Pines  of  good 
size  are  sometimes  to  be  seen  on  the  adjacent 
open  prairies,  growing  singly  or  in  small  groups. 
I  did  not  penetrate  the  mountains  between  Lar- 
amie  Plains  and  the  head  of  the  Arkansas,  but 
from  a  little  distance  they  often  appear  studded 
thickly  with  firs  and  pines.  They  are,  in  other 
places,  quite  bare.  I  should  think  that  the 
country  could  supply  pine  timber  enough  to  be 
of  essential  service  to  settlers,  though  they 
would  have  to  rely  chiefly  on  the  sun-baked 


FRANCIS   PARKMAN  85 

bricks  for  building.     If  this  region  is  ever  good 
for  anything,  it  will  be  for  pasturage. 

"  You  speak  of  the  Arapahoe  language.  I 
remember  trying  to  distinguish  their  words,  but 
one  might  as  well  try  to  find  articulate  sounds 
in  the  growling  '  of  a  bear.' ' 

As  it  happened,  Parkman  ascended  Mt. 
Washington  for  the  first  time  in  the  same  sum 
mer  in  which  I  made  my  first  ascent  there.  So 
it  happens  that  I  have  at  hand  a  copy  of  his 
journal  of  that  summer.  Here  is  a  little  scrap 
from  it.  Is  not  this  good  description  for  a  boy 
in  his  eighteenth  year  ? 

"  On  each  side,  thousands  of  feet  below, 
stretched  a  wide  valley,  girt  with  an  amphi 
theatre  of  mountains  rising  peak  after  peak  like 
the  black  waves  of  the  sea,  the  clouds  now  sink 
ing  over  their  summits,  now  rising  and  breaking, 
disclosing  yet  more  distant  ranges,  and  thus 
settling  thick  and  heavy  so  that  nothing  was 
visible  but  the  savage  rocks  and  avalanche  slides 
of  the  neighboring  mountains  looming  dimly 
through  the  mist.  At  length  the  clouds  closed 
around  and  we  could  not  even  see  one  another, 
and  we  descended  Mount  Pleasant  in  dark- 


ness." 


86          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

Parkman  died  on  the  8th  of  November, 
1893.  My  son  Robert  had  a  young  student's 
enthusiasm  for  Parkman,  but  I  am  afraid  they 
never  met.  Robert  wrote  this  sonnet  on  his 
death :  — 

"  With  youth's  blue  sky  and  charming  sunlight  blest 
And  flushed  with  hope,  he  set  himself  to  trace 
The  fading  footprints  of  a  banished  race, 

Unmindful  of  the  storm-clouds  in  the  west. 

In  silent  pain  and  torments  unconfessed, 
Determination  written  on  his  face, 
He  struggled  on,  nor  faltered  in  his  pace 

Until  his  work  was  done  and  he  could  rest. 

"  He  was  no  frightened  paleface  stumbling  through 
An  unknown  forest,  wandering  round  and  round. 

Like  his  own  Indians,  with  instinct  fine, 
He  knew  his  trail,  though  none  saw  how  he  knew ; 
Reckoned  his  time  and  reached  his  camping  ground 
Just  as  the  first  white  stars  began  to  shine." 

How  pleasant  a  thing  it  would  be  to  give  here 
even  a  little  sketch  of  the  work  of  Mr.  Higgin- 
son  as  a  historian.  In  the  wide  range  of  his 
duties,  as  soldier,  preacher,  poet,  and  indeed,  lib 
erator  of  mankind  in  general,  he  does  riot  forget 
that  he  descends  from  John  Higginson,  the  first 
"  teacher  "  of  the  first  Puritan  congregation  in 
"  the  Bay,"  a  pioneer  to  the  pioneers,  as  I  said 
of  John  Palfrey.  But  I  could  write  nothing 


FRANCIS    PARKMAN 


87 


about  his  life  which  T  should  not  send  to  him  for 
criticism  and  correction.     He  would  strike  out 
all  of  it,  because  he  would  call  it  too  cordial 
in  its  praise;  and  he 
would,    in    his    good 
nature,   write   a   pas 
sage  of  history  which 
would  take  the  light 
away  from  my  Memo 
ries. 

In  the  group  of 
Massachusetts  histori 
ans  belongs  John 
Fiske  also.  He  has 
died  since  the  prepa 
ration  of  these  papers 
began.  I  think  that 
even  his  friends  were 
surprised  when  in 
some  public  state 
ment,  made  more  than 
twenty-five  years  ago, 

Fiske  said  that  the  history  of  America  was 
his  favorite  study,  and  that  he  hoped  he  should 
come  back  to  it  before  he  died.  Fortunate 
for  us  that  he  did  come  back  to  it !  Nothing 
that  I  could  write  here  would  add  to  the  ad- 


THE  FIRST  HOME  OF  THE  MASSA 
CHUSETTS  HISTORICAL  SOCIETY. 
From  an  early  photograph. 


88          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

miration,  and  I  might  almost  say  reverence, 
of  those  who  have  read  his  histories,  or  of 
those  who  have  been  guided  and  blessed  by  his 
simple  statements  of  the  most  profound  realities 
of  the  infinite  life  of  man. 

Of  Mr.  Henry  Adams's  masterly  work,  which 
will  be  prized  more  and  more  with  every  new 
year,  I  have  already  spoken. 


ANTISLAVERY 


CHAPTER  III 

ANTISLAVERY 

SEVENTY  YEARS 

ANY  fond  hope  which  I  may  have  had, 
when  the  kind  reader  and  I  began  on 
these  papers,  that  we  could  condense  into  twelve 
articles  any  series  of  such  reminiscences  as  we 
have  written,  has  already  been  sadly  abandoned. 

How  can  we  treat  this  hustling,  jostling, 
bustling  half-century  which  we  have  seen  with 
our  eyes,  as  we  did  that  half-century  of  myth 
and  tradition  which  our  forefathers  lived  in  ? 

There  is  so  much  of  it,  so  much  of  invention, 
so  much  of  discovery,  such  miracles  in  religion, 
such  marvels  in  politics ! 

The  reign  of  God  is  so  much  closer ! 

Why,  in  1830,  George  Henry  Corliss  took  out 
his  first  patent  for  the  Cut-off.  That  one  man 
added  fifteen  per  cent  to  the  working  power 
of  the  human  race  by  that  invention.  Will  a 
score  or  two  of  historians  write  that  out  for  us  ? 

And  then  we  will  be  ready  to  trace  out  what 

91 


92  MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

has  followed  on  gutta-percha,  or  Grove's  sus 
taining  battery,  or  the  spectroscope,  and  a  thou 
sand  other  such  trifles. 

So  far  as  this   reader   and  I  are   concerned, 
from  this  time  forward  we  must  make  only  a 

selection  from 
the  great  range 
of  subjects 
which  belong 
in  the  study  of 
the  miraculous 
change  of  the 
world  in  the 
last  century. 

That  matter 
of  internal 
improvement, 
touched  upon 
only  too  briefly 

WILLIAM  LLOYD  GARRISON  AND  WENDELL       already         in 
PHILLIPS. 

Chapter    VII., 

is  an  illustration  of  the  change  wrought  by  work 
in  one  direction.  There  are  hundreds  of  others 
which  any  one  who  reads  with  any  system  ought 
to  follow  out,  if  he  really  means  to  comprehend 
the  difference  between  his  own  life  and  his 
grandfather's.  Thus,  in  1801  there  was  a  very 


SEVENTY   YEARS  93 

considerable  maritime  commerce.  We  built  the 
best  ships  in  the  world  from  as  good  ship  timber 
as  there  was  in  the  world.  Before  this,  in 
the  Revolution,  in  the  sea  fights  of  Lord  Howe 
and  D'Estaing  and  Paul  Jones  and  the  Spanish 
captains  —  the  spars  in  every  ship  built  by 
either  of  the  four  nations  were  spars  from  the 
forests  of  Maine,  New  Hampshire,  Vermont,  or 
New  York.  I  have  seen  men  who  had  seen 
pine  trees  in  the  New  Hampshire  woods  which 
still  bore  King  George's  broad  arrow.  This 
was  the  sign  that  they  were  selected  for  the 
King's  Navy. 

The  people  who  built  ships  with  such  ad 
vantages  could  man  them  with  the  best  sea 
men  in  the  world  —  the  descendants  of  Danes 
and  Norwegians,  men  whose  ancestors  had  been 
trained  since  the  Cabots'  time,  at  least,  in  the 
fog-banks  and  among  the  icebergs  of  the  fisheries. 

And  there  were,  thank  God !  enough  of  such 
men.  New  England  had  more  such  men  fight 
ing  King  George  upon  the  ocean  in  1780  and 
1781  than  King  George  had  on  the  same 
ocean  fighting  America.  The  ocean  commerce, 
for  which  such  men  were  bred,  consisted  in 
1801  in  the  exportation  to  Europe  of  furs, 
hides,  potash,  tobacco,  timber,  and  other  forest 


94          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

productions ;  and  to  the  West  Indies  of  almost 
every  article  of  agricultural  produce.  In  return, 
these  ships  brought  back  almost  all  the  manu 
factured  articles  which  America  needed.  Thus 
the  steam-engine  which  Fulton  placed  in  the 
Clermont  was  made  by  Watt  and  Boulton 
in  England.  We  were  beginning  also  to  sell 
the  " notions"  of  our  seaboard,  with  only  too 
much  of  the  rum  which  we  made  from  West 
India  molasses,  to  the  redskins  on  the  Pacific. 
They  gave  us  in  return  the  otter  skins  and 
beaver  skins  and  sables  which  we  carried  across 
to  the  mandarins  of  China,  from  whom  we 
brought  teas  and  silks  and  chinaware  and  the 
other  wonders  of  the  East.  But  long  before 
the  century  ended,  Cotton  had  asserted  itself 
as  king ;  we  were  no  longer  importing  our  nan 
keens  and  calicoes  and  muslins  and  other  tex 
tiles  with  Chinese  or  Sanscrit  names.  We 
were  sending  our  long-cloths  to  Canton  and  our 
bales  of  cotton  over  all  the  world.  The  great 
three-deckers  which  carried  out  our  cotton  to 
England  were  fitted  for  their  return  with  the 
partitions  for  families  and  the  berths  for  bed 
ding  which  should  meet  the  needs  of  five 
million  people  who  had  to  leave  the  old  hemi 
sphere  for  the  new. 


SEVENTY   YEARS  95 

The  introduction  of  home  manufacture  and 
the  creation  of  machinery  dependent  on  home 
manufacture  and  the  railway  system  make  up 
another  of  the  revolutions  of  the  century.  The 
emigration  from  east  to  west,  frowned  on  by 
Brahmins  and  Pundits,  but  insisted  on  by  the 
determined  sagacity  of  the  People,  is  another 
of  those  revolutions. 

And  at  the  heart  of  such  physical  changes 
there  were  advances  in  intellectual  training,  in 
morals,  and  of  course  in  social  order.  Take  the 
higher  education  of  women.  At  the  beginning 
of  the  century  the  Moravian  School  at  Bethle 
hem,  in  Pennsylvania,  was  the  only  school  in 
America  to  which  young  women  were  sent  for 
any  considerable  distance  for  intellectual  im 
provement.  And  in  the  public-school  system 
of  the  country,  so  far  as  there  was  any  such 
system,  girls  had  not  even  the  poor  chance  which 
boys  had. 

But  it  is  idle  even  to  make  a  catalogue  of 
visible  changes  in  social  order  which  have 
taken  place  in  the  last  two  generations  —  I 
will  not  say  even  three.  Let  me  cite  only  the 
least  instance  of  all,  of  advances  which  ought 
to  be  touched  upon.  Take  the  history  of  the 
chemical  match.  In  the  year  1782  William 


96          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED    YEARS 

Franklin,  in  Paris,  wrote  to  the  chemists  who 
had  sold  him  chemical  matches  for  fire  that  he 
would  like  to  show  some  friends  the  new  chemi 
cal  match.  They  replied  on  the  first  of  Octo 
ber  :  "  We  have  sent  for  some  phosphoric 
matches,  but  Monsieur  Detopierre  had  none 
made.  We  have  one  which  we  send  you.  .  .  . 
To-morrow  we  shall  have  more,  and  if  you  need 
to  send  to  us,  we  will  send  you  a  dozen." 

It  is  an  interesting  thing  to  look  back  on  a 
day  when  there  was  but  one  chemical  match 
in  Paris.  But  as  late  as  1828  I  and  my  brother 
introduced  the  chemical  match  into  the  menage 
of  my  father's  family.  Until  that  time  the 
old-fashioned  tinder-box,  a  machine  which  I 
cannot  buy  in  Boston  to-day,  presided  on  the 
mantelpiece  in  our  kitchen.  We  boys  intro 
duced  what  were  called  phosphorus  matches. 
We  bought  them  at  the  apothecaries',  giving 
twenty-five  cents  for  a  case.  You  dipped  the 
match,  which  was  made  of  chlorate  of  potash, 
into  a  sponge  which  was  charged  with  sulphuric 
acid.  Think  of  the  new  light  which  has  come 
to  every  household  in  America  in  the  seventy- 
four  years  that  have  passed  since !  And  let 
some  young  man  who  has  five  years  before 
him,  give  an  account  in  his  history  of  the  cen- 


SEVENTY   YEARS 


97 


tury,  of  the  introduction  of  the  friction  match 
and  of  the  thousands  on  thousands  of  years 
which  it  has  saved  to  the  human  family. 

The  friction  match,  then,  ought  to  make  one 
chapter  in  these  memoirs.  But  there  are  a 
thousand  other  advances  of  more  importance. 

To  name  Ideas, 
instead  of  things, 
the  great  Mission 
ary  Movements, 
so  far  as  America 
is  concerned ,  be 
gan  in  this  cen 
tury.  The  Tem 
perance  Societies 
and  many  other 
philanthropic  in 
stitutions  belong 
in  our  Hundred 
Years.  The  whole 
history  of  emigra 
tion  from  Europe,  WILLIAM  ELLERY  CHANNING. 
after  1640  be-  From  the  portrait  by  Gambardella. 

longs  to  them,  with  but  a  few  exceptional  inci 
dents,  such  as  Oglethorpe's  enterprise  and 
William  Penn's.  The  opening  up  of  the  West 
is  one  of  the  advances  of  the  Kingdom  of  God. 


VOL.   II. H 


98          MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

The  whole  system  of  manufacture  is  another; 
the  development  of  the  treasures  which  the  good 
God  left  scattered  around  loose  in  the  shape  of 
metals  is  another ;  and  I  might  go  on,  literally 
with  a  thousand  more. 

All  of  these  changes  were  dominated  by  the 
assertion  of  the  moral  laws.  Man  is  nearer 
to  God,  and  he  knows  better  how  near  God  is 
to  him,  than  he  knew  in  the  year  1801.  Man 
knows  that  God  loves  him.  The  fable  of  total 
depravity  has  gone  where  it  belongs,  and  man 
does  not  pretend  even  to  believe  that  he  is  a 
child  of  the  devil.  With  this  great  discovery 
the  whole  of  life  is  changed.  There  are  new 
heavens  and  there  is  a  new  earth. 

For  the  remaining  chapters  of  this  series, 
then,  I  am  to  select  only  three  or  four  steps  of 
the  progress  which  God's  children  have  made  in 
America.  I  shall  select  them  merely  as  my  own 
personal  life  illustrates  them.  And  it  is  almost 
of  course  that  the  first  of  these  steps,  however 
briefly  it  is  spoken  of,  should  be  the  advance 
which  the  country  made  in  the  abolition  of 
slavery.  This  is  a  business  which  began  with 
seriousness  in  the  debates  on  the  Missouri  Com 
promise  in  1819.  It  is  a  business,  also,  which 
is  not  finished  yet.  But  let  us  hope  that,  with 


ABOLITION   OF   SLAVERY  99 

the  new  Commission  of  Education,  with  the 
triumphs,  really  miraculous,  of  Hampton,  Cal- 
houn,  Tuskegee,  Snow  Hill,  and  the  rest,  we 
need  not  give  up  the  game.  With  such 
triumphs  to  reassure  us,  we  may  look  forward 
and  not  back. 


ABOLITION   OF   SLAVEEY 

I  bring  together  a  very  few  notes  and  a  few 
personal  recollections  to  serve  as  what  I  call 
"  broken  lights  "  which  to  a  certain  extent  illus 
trate  conditions  which  are  often  misunderstood. 

There  seems  to  have  been,  when  the  century 
began,  an  indifference,  which  is  now  curious,  as 
to  the  critical  and  universal  importance  of  a 
radical  solution  of  all  the  questions  regarding 
slavery.  I  have  already  said  that  I  have  found 
no  writer  who  at  that  time  regarded  the  matter 
of  slavery  as  indicating  the  cleavage  line  between 
North  and  South.  Gouverneur  Morris,  whom  I 
have  cited,  spoke  of  the  antagonism  as  that  be 
tween  five  oligarchies  and  eight  republics.  The 

distinction  is  absolutelv  correct,  but  he  does  not 

»/ 

refer  in  form  to  slavery,  out  of  which  the  oligar 
chies  were  created.  In  the  critical  election  of 
1801  Jefferson  was  the  Southern  candidate  and 


100        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

Burr  the  Northern.  But  Burr,  until  he  died, 
never  cared  a  straw  for  slavery,  while  Jefferson 
at  that  time  would  have  been  called  an  anti- 
slavery  man. 

In  a  measure,  this  indifference  may  be  referred 
to  the  outside  fact  that  there  were  still  a  few 
slaves  in  most  of  the  Northern  States.  In  Rhode 
Island,  and  perhaps  one  might  say  in  Pennsyl 
vania,  there  were  so  many  as  to  incline  the 
people  of  those  States  against  entering  on  any 
radical  projects  for  abolition.  In  Philadelphia, 
however,  there  did  exist  the  strong  repugnance 
of  the  Quakers  to  slavery,  a  repugnance  which 
from  an  early  time  had  shown  itself  in  public 
"testimonies"  and  in  the  habits  of  domestic 
life. 

For  some  reason  there  certainly  was  a  general 
indifference  to  the  subject,  which,  as  I  have  said, 
seems  curious  when  we  think  of  the  catastrophes 
which  have  followed.  We  look  back  now  on 
slavery  and  its  consequences  as  involving  a  ter 
rible  war,  and  conditions  of  social  life  which 
carry  with  them  our  most  dangerous  problems. 
But  for  the  first  twenty  years  of  the  century  the 
discussion  may  be  called  purely  academic,  and 
indeed  it  hardly  assumes  that  importance.  To 
my  own  mind  the  real  distinction  of  the  great 


CAUTION!! 

COLORED  PEOPLE 

OF  BOSTON,  ONE  &  ALL, 

¥00  are  hereby  respectfully  (CAUTIONED  and 
advised,  to  avoid  conversing  with  the 

Watchmen  and  Police  Officers 
of  Boston, 

For  since  the  recent  ORDER  OF  THE  MAYOR  A 
ALDERMEN,  they  are  empowered  to  act  as 

KIDNAPPERS 


AND 


Slaye  Catchers, 

And  they  have  already  been  actually  employed  in 
KIDNAPPING,     CATCHING,  AND    KEEPING 

SLAVES.    Therefore,  if  you  value  your  LIBERTY, 
and  the  If  YJ/«we  of  She  Fugitives  among  you,  *Atm 


them  in  every  possible  manner,  as  so  many  UOU2VDS 
on  the  track  of  the  most  unfortunate  of  your  race. 

Keep  a  Sharp  Look  Out  for 

KIDNAPPERS,  and  have 

TOP  EYE  open. 

APRIL  24,  1851. 


THEODORE  PARKER'S  PLACARD. 

Placard  written  by  Theodore  Parker,  and  printed  and  posted  by  the 
Vigilance  Committee  of  Boston  after  the  rendition  of  Thomas  Sims 
to  slavery  in  April,  1851. 


ABOLITION    OF   SLAVERY  103 

antislavery  agitators  of  the  beginning  is  that 
they  forecast  the  future  truly.  Even  now  I  do 
not  see  that  any  of  them  can  make  any  other 
claim  to  statesmanship.  It  seems  fair  to  say 
that  the  moral  sense  of  the  Christian  world 
becomes  more  quick  with  every  year ;  and  that 
the  absolute  wrong  of  slavery  asserted  itself 
more  and  more  distinctly  as  this  improvement 
went  forward. 

You  can  find  traces  of  the  dislike  of  slavery, 
not  from  economical  grounds,  but  simply  on 
moral  principle,  almost  as  far  back  as  John 
Hawkins,  who  invented  the  English  slave-trade. 
Hawkins  lived  long  enough  to  fight  against  the 
Spanish  Armada.  I  am  the  more  interested  in 
him  because  the  genealogies  say  that  he  is  my 
grandfather's  great-grandfather's  great-great 
grandfather,  or  something  of  that  sort.  What 
I  know  is  that  because  he  invented  the  English 
slave-trade  Queen  Elizabeth  knighted  him  and 
gave  him  for  a  crest  a  "  kneeling  blackamoor." 

As  early  as  the  "  Body  of  Liberties,"  compiled 
in  1641,  the  General  Court  declared,  "  There 
shall  never  be  any  bond  slaverie,  villenage,  or 
captivitie,  unless  it  be  lawful  captives,  taken  in 
just  wars,  and  such  strangers  as  willingly  sell 
themselves  or  are  sold  to  us."  And  all  captives 


104        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

or  foreigners,  free  or  not  free,  are  at  liberty  to 
come  to  any  public  court,  and,  either  by  speech 
or  writing,  to  make  any  motion. 

But  within  fifty  years  of  Hawkins's  death, 
when  the  first  slaves  were  brought  into  Massa 
chusetts  Bay,  the  General  Court  sent  them  back 
again  with  a  stiff  protest  which  declares 

"  The  Genrall  Corte,  conceiving  themselues 
bound  by  ye  first  opportunity  to  bear  witnes 
against  ye  haynos  &  crying  sinn  of  man  stealing, 
as  also  to  pscribe  such  timely  redresse  for  what 
is  past,  &  such  a  law  for  ye  future  as  may  suf 
ficiently  deterr  all  othrs  belonging  to  us  to  have 
to  do  in  such  vile  &  most  odious  courses,  iustly 
abhored  of  all  good  and  iust  men,  do  order  y1  ye 
negro  interpreter,  wth  othrs  unlawfully  taken,  be, 
by  ye  first  oportunity,  (at  ye  charge  of  ye  country 
for  psent)  sent  to  his  native  country  of  Ginny,  & 
a  letter  wth  him  of  ye  indignation  of  ye  Corte 
thereabouts,  &  iustice  hereof,  desireing  or  honored 
Govrnr  would  please  to  put  this  order  in  execution. 

"  The  Cort  thought  fit  to  write  to  Mr  Williams, 
of  Pascataq,  (und'standing  y*  ye  negrs  wch  Capt 
Smyth  brought  were  fraudulently  &  iniuriously 
taken  and  brought  from  Ginny,  by  Capt  Smiths 
confession,  &  ye  rest  of  ye  Company,)  y1  he  forth- 
wth  send  ye  neger  wch  he  had  of  Capt  Smyth 


ABOLITION   OF   SLAVERY  105 

hither,  y*  he  may  be  sent  home,  wch  ye  Cort  doth 
resolve  to  sen  back  wthout  delay ;  &  if  you  have 
any  thing  to  aleadge  why  yo11  should  not  returne 
him,  to  be  disposed  of  by  ye  Cort,  it  wil  be  ex 
pected  yo11  should  forthwth  make  it  appear,  either 
by  yorselfe  or  yor  agent,  but  not  to  make  any 
excuse  or  delay  in  sending  of  him." 

The  charter  of  the  Province  by  King  William 
III.  of  the  date  of  1690  is  very  strong.  It  gives 
to  all  residents  in  the  province  "  the  liberties  of 
natural-born  subjects."  But,  in  face  of  this, 
slavery  worked  its  way  in.  Somewhat  as  Mr. 
Chamberlain  is  sending  prisoners  of  war  to  the 
Bermudas  just  now  when  I  am  writing,  Gov 
ernor  Stoughton  and  the  other  magistrates  of 
Massachusetts  had  sent  King  Philip's  wife  and 
child  to  be  slaves  in  the  Bermudas  in  1676.  On 
the  other  hand,  the  same  Judge  Sewall  who 
hanged  the  witches  was  printing  his  tracts 
against  slavery  as  early  as  1700,  and  until  he 
died  in  1730  he  renewed  his  protest  on  all 
occasions. 

But,  at  the  same  time,  here  is  Daniel  De  Foe 
in  1719  creating  Robinson  Crusoe,  one  of  the 
most  remarkable  characters  in  fiction,  perhaps 
the  most  remarkable.  De  Foe  is  distinctly  and 
definitely  a  religious  man.  He  not  only  pre- 


106        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 


tends  to  be  religious,  he  is  religious.  He  says 
distinctly  that  the  whole  story  describes  his 
own  inner  religious  experience.  Robinson  Cru 
soe  is  distinctly  a  religious  man.  Now,  a  reli 
gious  writer  like  De  Foe,  creating  a  religious  hero 

like  Robinson, 
makes  of  him 
a  Brazilian 
slave-trader 
who  is  ship 
wrecked  in  a 
slave-ship 
which  he  had 
himself  fitted 
out  to  bring  a 
cargo  of  slaves 
from  Africa  to 
Brazil.  This 
hero  becomes 
the  most  popu 
lar  hero  in  Eng 
lish  romance  for  a  century,  perhaps  I  might  say 
for  two.  Yet,  in  all  the  literary  criticism  of  the 
book  for  a  century,  I  think  no  one  has  found  one 
word  among  the  moralists  of  England  which 
finds  the  least  fault  with  Robinson  on  account 
of  his  active  participation  in  the  slave-trade.  It 


ABOLITION   OF   SLAVERY  107 

seems  to  me  that  this  absolute  silence  on  such  a 
point  shows  the  utter  indifference  of  the  public 
mind  of  England  in  the  matter.1 

But  fifty  years  after  Se wall's  death,  the  critical 
and  famous  trial  which  gave  to  the  slave  Somer- 
sett  his  freedom  in  England  testifies  to  the  fun 
damental  existence  of  the  principle  of  freedom, 
concealed  perhaps  because  it  was  fundamental 
and  therefore  underground.  Cowper  took  up 
the  famous  decision,  and  his  two  lines, 

"  Slaves  cannot  breathe  in  England ;  if  their  lungs 
Eeceive  our  air,  that  moment  they  are  free," 

(in  1781)  are  better  known  than  Lord  Mansfield's 
decision  on  which  they  were  founded.  Really 
Holt's  decision  is  much  earlier.  Cowper  took 
these  words,  not  from  Mansfield,  but  from  Mr. 
Hargrave's  argument.  Hargrave  said  that  "  the 

1  For  the  benefit  of  my  friends  in  that  admirable  historical 
circle  which  is  doing  such  good  work  in  North  Carolina  I  write 
this  line  to  say  that  one  at  least  of  Daniel  De  Foe's  sons  went  to 
North  Carolina,  settled  and  died  there.  Daniel  De  Foe's  own 
knowledge  of  life  in  America  is  indicated  in  his  capital  novel 
"  Colonel  Jack,"  of  which  the  scene  is  laid  on  the  site  of  Wash 
ington  and  Georgetown,  a  novel  now  read  by  no  one  excepting 
myself  and  three  intimate  friends.  In  this  capital  novel,  I  say 
(imitating  Robinson  Crusoe's  method)  there  is  enough  to  show 
that  he  knew  all  about  planting  on  our  side  of  the  water.  This 
suggests  to  our  North  Carolina  friends  that  they  ought  to  look 
up  the  De  Foe  plantation  and  perhaps  find  some  descendants, 
personal  or  spiritual — Devaux  perhaps?  or  Walter  Page  perhaps  ? 


108        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

air  of  England  is  deemed  too  pure  for  slaves  to 
breathe  in." 

It  was  not  the  first  time,  nor  the  last,  when 
the  great  lawyers  appeared  as  the  apostles  of 
liberty.  Possibly  under  other  conditions  Lord 
Mansfield's  decision  might  have  been  pressed  in 
the  North  American  colonies,  by  way  of  follow 
ing  up  the  victory  of  two  years  before.  Nobody 
even  dreamed  of  carrying  the  Mansfield  decision 
to  the  West  Indies,  where  the  islands  were  not 
colonies,  but,  as  we  say,  dependencies.  And 
1772  was  not  a  very  favorable  time  for  assert 
ing  the  value  of  a  decision  made  in  an  English 
law  court,  as  governing  the  North  American 
colonies. 

We  have  not  the  young  John  Lowell's  brief  in 
the  case  of  Caesar  Hendrick  against  his  master, 
but  the  Court  Record  shows  that  in  1773,  John 
Lowell  of  Newburyport  was  counsel  for  Caesar 
Hendrick  who  claimed  under  the  charter,  and 
perhaps  under  Holt's  decision,  his  freedom. 
They  won  their  case.  And  I  hope  that  some 
time  the  County  Courts  will  engrave  upon  their 
seals  the  broken  links  of  a  useless  chain,  with 
the  motto,  Sic  semper  tyrannis.  This  same  John 
Lowell  and  the  men  around  him,  introduced  in 
the  Bill  of  Rights  of  Massachusetts  the  passage 


ABOLITION   OF   SLAVERY  109 

which  they  found  in  the  Bill  of  Eights  in  Vir 
ginia  in  1776,  "  all  men  are  born  free  and  equal." 
He  is  the  man  whom  I  call  "the  emancipator," 
-the  grandfather  of  the  poet  of  freedom. 

There  had  been  in  1769,  two  years  before  the 
famous  Somersett  decision,  a  suit  brought  by  a 
negro  in  our  Massachusetts  courts  which  came  to 
trial  in  1770.  The  negroes  contributed  money 
themselves  for  the  expenses  of  the  case.  It  is 
the  case  James  vs.  Lechmere,  which  terminated 
favorably  for  them.  The  blacks  pleaded  that 
the  Royal  Charter  declared  that  all  persons  born 
or  residing  in  the  province  were  as  free  as  the 
King's  subjects  in  Great  Britain. 

As  soon  as  the  Constitution  of  the  new 
State  and  the  Bill  of  Rights  were  in  force,  a 
negro  named  Quork  Walker,  with  men  as  dis 
tinguished  as  Caleb  Strong  and  Levi  Lincoln 
(the  elder)  as  his  counsel,  sued  his  master  for  as 
sault  "  with  the  handle  of  a  whip,"  and  the  repli 
cation  states  that  he  was  a  freeman  and  not  a 
slave.  A  careful  trial  gave  him  his  freedom. 
His  counsel  did  not  satisfy  themselves  with  urg 
ing  the  Bill  of  Rights.  Judge  Washburn  prints 
much  of  their  brief,  with  its  constant  references 
to  the  rights  of  man.  It  is  interesting  to  see 
that  before  Cowper's  lines  in  the  "  Task  "  could 


110        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

have  been  read  here,  this  brief  cites  Hargrave's 
famous  epigram,  with  a  change  in  the  language, 
"  The  air  of  America  is  too  pure  for  a  slave  to 
breathe  in." 

All  this  time  there  was  a  strong  antislavery 
sentiment  in  Virginia  —  a  sentiment  certainly 
shared  by  some  of  the  leaders.  But  I  think 
that  no  slave  there  ever  claimed  his  rights  in 
Virginia  under  this  same  declaration  of  their  Bill 
of  Rights. 

One  speaks  with  great  caution,  or  ought  to ; 
but  I  should  say  that  all  slavery  discussion  in 
the  Convention  which  made  the  National  Consti 
tution  was  governed,  to  the  eye  at  least,  by 
economical  considerations  —  that  the  moral  ele 
ments  involved  were  hardly  referred  to.  I  think 
it  would  be  safe  to  say  that  a  similar  indifference 
to  moral  principles  appears  in  the  languid  dis 
cussions  of  the  matter  already  referred  to,  which 
you  find,  with  some  difficulty,  between  1800  and 
1819.  The  occasional  "testimonies  "  of  some 
Quaker  meeting  are  the  great  exceptions,  al 
though  on  the  other  side  of  the  water  the  anti- 
slavery  movement,  as  led  by  Clarkson  and  his 
friends,  was  already  well  under  way. 

Careful  readers  must  remember  that  in  such 
discussions  condemnation  of  the  slave  trade  was 


ABOLITION    OF    SLAVERY  111 

far  in  advance  of  the  condemnation  of  slavery. 
The  United  States  pronounced  the  slave-trade 
piracy  in  1808,  as  early  as  the  Constitution  per 
mitted  such  action.  The  precedent  which  made 
a  slave-trader  a  pirate  was  given  by  the  United 
States,  and  was  followed  by  all  the  maritime 
nations.  This  was  while  the  United  States  at 
home  was  using  all  its  National  powers  to  main 
tain  the  institution  of  slavery. 

As  early  as  1772  there  appears  at  Yale  College 
the  first  question  ever  debated  by  the  Linonian 
Society.  It  was,  "  Is  it  right  to  enslave  the 
Africans?"  I  think,  by  the  way,  that  this  rec 
ord,  bad  spelling  and  all,  is  made  by  my  great- 
uncle,  Nathan  Hale,  the  same  who  was  hanged 
by  Howe. 

At  the  great  bi-centennial  celebration  at  New 
Haven  I  asked  a  very  bright  woman  why  in 
New  Haven,  where  Eli  Whitney  graduated,  and 
where  he  spent  most  of  his  life,  and  where  his 
descendants  live  honored  to  this  day,  nobody  in 
four  days  of  eloquence  and  song  had  one  word  to 
say  about  this  graduate  of  the  University,  though 
he  had  by  one  invention  revolutionized  the  com 
merce  of  the  world.  She  answered  on  the  in 
stant  by  asking  in  turn  if  this  same  Eli  Whitney, 
by  this  same  invention,  had  not  continued  Afri- 


112        MEMORIES    OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

can  slavery  for  half  a  century  longer  than  it 
would  have  existed  had  there  been  no  cotton-gin. 
The  general  verdict  agrees  that  this  is  so.  Of 
course  no  one  ever  blamed  poor  Whitney. 

But  with  the  advance,  which  seemed  miracu 
lous,  of  the  cotton  crop  of  the  country,  slave 
labor  wras  no  longer  devoted  to  plantations  of 
corn,  wheat,  tobacco,  rice,  and  indigo.  Cotton 
became  king,  and  the  institution  of  slavery 
seemed  profitable.  The  moral  protest  of  the 
Quakers,  and  of  such  idealists  as  Washington, 
Jefferson,  and  other  Southern  men  like  them, 
was  of  less  and  less  avail.  Almost  without 
men's  knowing  it,  the  jealousy  between  agricul 
tural  States  and  commercial  States  became  a 
conflict  between  the  slave  States  and  those  which 
were  free. 

And  this  will  be  as  good  a  place  as  any  to  say 
that  the  advice  of  the  English  abolitionists  from 
the  time  of  Clarkson  down  to  the  Civil  War 
probably  did  more  hurt  than  good  in  the  matter 
of  emancipation  in  America.  From  the  Stamp 
Act  down,  the  American  people,  by  and  large, 
have  not  fancied  English  advice  in  the  matter  of 
their  politics.  They  had  to  take  it  sometimes, 
but  even  when  'they  "  ate  crow  they  did  not 
hanker  for  it."  Thus,  they  had  to  accept  the 


ABOLITION   OF    SLAVERY  113 

"Common  Sense"  of  Tom  Paine,  but  they  never 
liked  Tom  Paine,  and  to  this  day  his  name  is  not 
acceptable.  Paul  Jones  was  their  loyal  servant, 
and  won  for  them  splendid  victories.  But  Paul 
Jones  never  had  his  deserts  at  their  hands,  simply 
because  he  was  a  Scotchman.  Gates  and  Lee 
were  placed  in  service  next  to  Washington,  and 
of  both  those  Englishmen  the  record  was  as  bad 
as  it  could  be.  And  so  one  might  go  on,  repeat 
ing  instance  after  instance  of  an  alienation 
springing  out  of  the  Revolution,  sometimes  to  be 
justified  and  often  unjustifiable,  which  for  nearly 
a  century  made  English  advice  very  unpalatable 
to  the  rank  and  file  of  America.  I  will  venture 
to  say  at  this  moment  that  American  advice  is 
just  as  "unpalatable  in  England  at  this  hour. 
There  seems  to  be  a  certain  Anglo-Saxon  habit 
which  makes  each  nation  say,  "  If  you  will  mind 
your  business,  we  will  mind  ours.  "  See  1  Thess. 
iv.  11. 

The  Congressional  debates  of  1819  and  1820 
become  the  first  discussions  of  the  modern  type 
as  to  the  principles  which  lie  under  slavery.  I 
have  already  spoken  of  them.  It  was  my  busi 
ness  in  1854  to  read,  abridge,  and  publish  again 
these  debates,  so  far  as  they  are  preserved,  and  I 
like  to  testify  as  to  the  great  ability  of  the  dis- 


114        MEMORIES    OF   A   HUNDRED    YEARS 

cussion  on  both  sides.  But  even  then  the  dis 
cussion  was  more  on  constitutional  than  on 
ethical  questions.  What  had  Congress  a  right 
to  do,  what  had  the  Northern  States  a  right 


EDMUND  QUINCY. 

to  do,  in  the  way  of  prohibiting  slavery  in  the 
Territories  ? 

In  a  very  valuable  review  which  Mr.  McMaster 
has  prepared  for  his  own  history  as  to  the  prog 
ress  of  antislavery  sentiment  and  antislavery 


ABOLITION   OF   SLAVERY  115 

discussion,  he  gives  a  curious  list  of  the  different 
antislavery  newspapers,  beginning  as  early  as 
1817.  There  were  three  or  four  times  as  many 
different  journals  of  such  sentiment  in  the 
country  as  there  were  forty  years  after,  and  all 
the  earlier  ones  were  printed  in  slave  States. 
This  was  precisely  as  there  were  temperance 
journals  in  Massachusetts  which  inveighed 
against  the  manufacture  of  rum,  because  we 
made  rum  here,  while  there  were  none  in  Wash 
ington  or  Savannah,  because  they  did  not  make 
rum  there. 

"  Slavery  is  their  business,  not  ours."  This 
was  practically  the  motto  of  all  political  parties, 
and  of  the  men  of  commerce  or  of  affairs.  A 
good  story  of  David  Henshaw  and  of  a  Virgin 
ian  friend  in  Norfolk,  which  must  belong  as  late 
as  the  forties,  perhaps  the  fifties,  may  as  well  go 
into  print.  Mr.  Henshaw  was  Secretary  of  the 
Navy  in  one  of  the  Southern  Cabinets.  He  was 
one  of  the  leaders  of  the  Democratic  party  of 
Massachusetts  ;  one  of  the  men  "  who  kept  that 
party  conveniently  small,"  so  that  all  its  leaders 
had  Federal  offices.  Mr.  Henshaw  was  one  of 
the  early  railway  men,  a  man  of  foresight 
enough  and  courage  enough  to  know  what 
modern  civilization  would  demand.  It  was  long 


116        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

before  the  war  that  he  was  in  Norfolk,  Virginia, 
consulting  with  some  of  the  leaders  there  as  to 
the  opening  up  of  communication  westward 


THOMPSON, 

THE   ABOLITIONIST. 


That  Infamous  foreign  scoundrel  THOMPSON,  will 
hold  forth  this  afternoon,  at  the  Liberator  Office,  No. 
48,  Washington  Street*  The  present  Is  a  fair  opportu 
nity  for  the  friends  of  the  Union  to  snake  Thompson 
out!  It  will  he  a  contest  between  the  Abolitionists  and 
the  friends  of  the  Union.  A  purse  of  01OO  has  been 
raised  by  a  number  of  patriotic  citizens  to  reward  the 
individual  who  shall  first  lay  violent  hands  on  Thompson, 
so  that  he  may  be  brought  to  the  tar  kettle  before  dark. 
Friends  of  the  Union,  be  vigilant  I 

Botsion,  Wednesday,  19 


A  PRO-SLAVERY  HANDBILL. 

This  was  printed  at  the  office  of  the  Boston  Commercial  Gazette, 
under  the  direction  of  the  proprietor,  James  L.  Homer,  on  the  21st 
of  October,  1835,  and  was  directed  against  George  Thompson,  who 
was  then  causing  great  excitement  by  his  eloquent  addresses  against 
slavery.  The  poster  was  set  up  and  run  off  on  a  hand-press  by  two 
apprentices  of  Homer,  one  of  whom  was  George  C.  Rand,  subse 
quently  a  master  printer  of  Boston  and  the  first  printer  of  "  Uncle 
Tom's  Cabin."  These  two  boys  then  distributed  them  among  the 
bar-rooms  and  barber-shops  of  the  business  section  of  the  city,  with 
the  result  that  by  two  o'clock  a  raging  mob  of  5000  people  gathered 
about  the  antislavery  office,  and  shortly  after  laid  violent  hands 
upon  Mr.  Garrison,  in  the  absence  of  Mr.  Thompson,  who  was  out 
of  the  city. 

from  their  magnificent  harbor.  As  he  rode  with 
one  of  his  Virginian  friends  one  day,  the  South 
erner  said,  "  You  abolitionists  say  "  this  or  that. 


ABOLITION   OF   SLAVERY  117 

Henshaw  disclaimed  the  word.  The  Democrats 
of  that  day  kept  their  garments  very  clear  from 
such  stains.  The  Virginian  laughed.  "  I  know 
you  make  your  distinctions.  But  we  call  you 
all  abolitionists."  Henshaw  would  not  laugh. 


k~n 


A  LETTER  FROM  THEODORE  PARKER  ON  THE  ANTISLAVERY  ENTER 
PRISE.    DATED  SEPT.  10,  1855. 

"  You  are  quite  wrong,"  he  said.  "  We  are  as 
fond  of  our  ways  as  you  are  of  yours.  We 
manufacture  cotton  and  wool  and  shoes  and 
iron.  We  send  our  ships  into  every  ocean.  And 
if,  to  maintain  slave  labor,  you  choose  to  let  your 
magnificent  cataracts  go  to  waste,  to  let  your 


118        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

coal  lie  unburned  and  your  iron  unsmelted,  to 
send  your  .timber  to  us  for  our  purposes,  and 
never  to  build  a  ship  in  these  waters,  some  of 
us,  I  assure  you,  are  very  much  obliged  to  you." 

This  was  enough,  and  the  Virginian  said  in 
reply,  "  Well !  Mr.  Henshaw,  pray  do  not  think 
that  we  are  all  damned  fools." 

Newport  News  and  its  magnificent  ship-build 
ing  make  the  comment  to-day  on  that  anecdote. 

To  refer  once  more  to  personal  recollections, 
I  had  always  been  trained  at  home  to  absolute 
courtesy,  not  to  say  tenderness,  to  all  such 
negroes  as  we  saw  in  Boston.  I  should  have 
been  taken  to  task  very  severely  had  I  failed  at 
all  in  such  courtesies.  Yet  I  remember  perfectly 
the  indignation  with  which,  when  I  was  ten  or 
eleven  years  old,  I  saw  on  a  placard  in  the  win 
dow  of  the  Old  Corner  Bookstore  in  Boston  the 
announcement  of  Mrs.  Child's  book  called  "  An 
Appeal  for  that  Class  of  Americans  Called 
Africans."  I  and  the  boy  with  me  were  indig 
nant  that  a  negro  should  be  called  an  American 
at  all.  This  was  the  first  antislavery  book  with 
"  stiff  covers,"  as  the  Authors'  Club  would  say, 
which  was  published  in  America.  Years  before 
this,  acting  I  suppose  under  the  stimulus  of  some 
sermon  on  charity,  I  stopped  a  black  boy  under 


ABOLITION    OF   SLAVERY 


119 


the  Paddock  elms  in  Boston,  as  I  was  going  to 
school,  and,  to  his  great  surprise,  gave  him  a 
cent.  In  later  times  I  have  given  a  great  many 
cents  to  other  black  people,  merely  on  the  princi 
ple  of  penance,  because  I  have  no  other  way  of 
expressing  my 
regret  for  the 
conduct  of  my 
ancestors  t  o 
ward  theirs. 
But  this  largess 
to  the  black  boy 
was  not  based  on 
any  such  feel 
ing.  It  grew 
simply  from  the 
tone  taken  in 
English  story 
books,  in  which 
at  that  time, 
black  boys  and 
chimney-  sweeps 

were  badly  mixed  together,  and  the  impression 
was  given  to  a  child  of  seven  that  black  boys 
were  of  necessity  poor.  I  recollect  hearing  bigger 
boys  say  that,  except  on  "  Nigger  Election,"  black 
boys  were  not  permitted  to  come  farther  than  a 


THEODORE  PARKER'S  GRAVE. 


120         MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

certain  point  on  the  Common.  But  this  limita 
tion,  if  it  ever  existed,  was  a  mere  tradition  in 
my  time,  belonging  with  the  myths  about  battles 
between  North-Enders  and  South-Enders. 

I  should  say  that  1833,  the  date  of  Mrs. 
Child's  book,  marks  the  beginning  of  the  period 
in  which  the  discussion  of  the  question  of 
slavery  was  taken  at  all  seriously  at  the  North. 
As  lately  as  when  I  left  college,  in  1839,  my 
classmate,  the  late  William  Francis  Channing, 
was,  I  think,  the  only  man  in  our  class  who 
would  have  permitted  himself  to  be  called  an 
abolitionist.  I  should  not,  I  am  sure.  I  do  not 
think  Samuel  Longfellow  would.  The  Liberator 
had  been  founded  on  the  first  of  January,  1831. 
But  it  certainly  did  not  attract  much  attention 
for  several  years. 

A   GENERATION   OF   MEN 

In  the  fifth  chapter  of  Volume  I.  I  have 
already  given  a  severely  condensed  account  of 
the  debate  on  the  Missouri  Compromise.  That 
was  at  the  end  of  the  generation  after  the  com 
promises  of  the  Constitution.  And,  as  I  have 
said  already,  each  generation  has  to  settle  these 
things  anew.  In  that  chapter  I  spoke  of  the 
disgraceful  omission  by  Mr.  George  Ticknor 


A   GENERATION    OF   MEN  121 

Curtis  in  his  life  of  Daniel  Webster  of  any 
reference  to  Mr.  Webster's  presiding  at  the 
Boston  meeting  which  was  called  in  the  State 
House  and  protested  against  the  introduction  of 
slavery  in  Missouri.  The  address  to  the  people, 
drawn  by  him  —  now  very  rare  —  will  be  re 
printed  in  full  in  Little  &  Brown's  new  edition 
of  his  works. 

It  was  three  years  later  that  Ralph  Waldo 
Emerson  wrote  thus  of  Mr.  Webster,  on  the 
12th  of  November,  1822:  "By  dint  of  much 
electioneering,  the  good  cause  has  succeeded, 
and  we  are  sending  our  giant  down  among  you 
false  Sothrons.  We  are  proudly  anticipating 
the  triumph  of  the  Northern  interest  to  be 
gained  or  to  be  achieved  by  Mr.  Webster.  .  .  . 
I  think  Mr.  Webster  had  about  two-thirds  of 
the  whole  number  of  votes."  Observe  that 
Emerson  had  graduated  in  1821.  It  is  perhaps 
worth  while  to  note  a  few  of  what  I  like  to 
call  the  broken  lights  of  the  time,  which  show 
how  strong  was  the  feeling  already  existing. 

There  was  a  great  fire  in  Savannah.  Its  gov 
ernment  implored  relief.  Among  other  cities, 
New  York  remitted  eleven  thousand  dollars.  In 
sending  the  money  the  New  York  people  asked 
that  it  might  be  distributed  among  the  poorer 


122        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

citizens  of  Savannah,  and  added  the  condition, 
"without  distinction  of  color."  These  unfortu 
nate  words  sealed  its  fate;  the  hot  blood  of 
Savannah  boiled,  and,  by  a  vote  of  the  Council, 
the  insult  was  met  by  sending  back  the  money 
with  a  short,  impertinent  letter. 

A  Philadelphia  insurance  company, when  asked 
at  what  rate  it  would  insure  some  Southern 
property,  answered  that  its  directors  had  con 
cluded  that  they  would  not  take  any  more  risks 
south  of  the  Mason  and  Dixon  line.  I  am  afraid 
that  in  this  generation  I  must  tell  our  younger 
readers  that  Mason  and  Dixon 's  line  is  the  line 
which  separates  Maryland,  a  Southern  State, 
and  Pennsylvania,  a  Northern  State. 

In  the  June  number  of  the  North  American 
Review  of  1820  was  a  paper  by  Judge  Lemuel 
Shaw,  afterward  Chief  Justice  of  Massachusetts, 
in  defence  of  the  "Restriction."  Judge  Story 
printed  a  charge  on  the  slave-trade  in  the 
midst  of  the  discussion.  Indeed  the  antislavery 
feeling  of  the  North  asserted  itself  in  a  hundred 
ways. 

I  cannot  help  wishing  that  somebody  would  at 
this  late  date  reprint  what  is  left  of  the  discus 
sions  in  the  Senate  and  the  House  on  the  funda 
mental  question.  To  tell  the  whole  truth,  I  had 


A   GENERATION   OF   MEN  123 

meant  in  this  chapter  to  print  a  good  many 
mementos  of  it.  But  space  is  space,  and  a  few 
lines  must  be  all. 

Take  these  epigrams  as  illustrations  of  what 
was  said  on  each  side.  John  Randolph  cried,  in 
the  House,  "  God  has  given  us  Missouri,  and  the 
devil  cannot  take  it  from  us." 

Lowrie,  of  Pennsylvania,  in  the  House  said, 
"  If  the  alternative  be  the  dissolution  of  this 
Union  or  the  extension  of  slavery  over  the  whole 
western  country,  I  choose  the  former." 

Harrison  Gray  Otis's  speech  is  worth  reading 
to-day.  "  The  gentleman  talks  of  sparks  ignited. 
I  can  tell  him  that  when  the  pine  forests  of 
Maine  are  lighted  they  burn  with  quite  as  fierce 
a  flame  as  the  spire-grass  of  Missouri." 

The  great  debate,  the  "  Misery  Debate,"  as  it 
was  called  in  joke  sometimes,  ended  in  what  men 
still  call  "  Mr.  Clay's  first  Compromise."  Very 
little  of  his  great  speech  is  preserved.  This  pas 
sage  is  one  of  those  which  remain  :  "  I  appeal  to 
Pennsylvania,  the  unambitious  Pennsylvania,  the 
keystone  of  the  Federal  arch,  whether  she  will 
concur  in  a  measure  calculated  to  disturb  the 
peace  of  this  Union." 

The  formation  of  the  Colonization  Society  in 
1817  is  a  curious  rather  than  an  important  sign 


124        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

of  the  times.  In  the  near  future  the  colony  of 
Liberia  may  yet  prove  important  in  the  progress 
of  the  development  of  Africa.  But  at  the  time 
when  the  Society  was  formed  even  its  enthusi 
astic  friends  did  not  pretend  that  it  would  re 
move  the  question  of  slavery  from  American 
politics.  After  Mr.  McMaster's  careful  and  full 
discussions  of  its  early  operations,  I  should  not 
venture  to  throw  in  any  side-lights.  It  is  enough 
here  to  say  that  the  officers  of  the  Society  gave, 
for  its  reason  for  being,  the  degradation  of  the 
free  people  of  color.  They  printed  statistics 
which,  as  I  believe,  were  awfully  untrue1  as  to 
the  amount  of  crime,  disease,  and  other  wretched 
ness  among  them.  They  declared  that  such 
degradation  resulted  from  their  anomalous  posi 
tion,  that  they  were  neither  fish  nor  fowl,  because 
they  were  neither  slaves  nor  white  men,  and 
that  it  was  but  fair  to  them  to  place  them  in  a 
new  country  where  they  could  show  what  their 
race  was  fit  for.  Their  earliest  reports  disclaim 
any  effort  to  increase  the  number  of  emancipated 
slaves. 

Even   before   this  time  James  Madison   had 
altered  the  provision  of  his  will  by  which  he  had 

1  From  a  curious  and  important  error,  which  appears  in  all 
the  early  censuses. 


A   GENERATION   OF   MEN  125 

determined  that  his  slaves  should  be  freed  after 
Mrs.  Madison's  death. 

What  is  certain  is  that,  from  the  time  of  the 
Missouri  Compromise  forward,  the  antislavery 
feeling  of  Virginia,  or  of  the  leaders  of  Virginia, 
declined,  and  that  the  discussion  of  the  subject 
in  the  Northern  States  took  on  more  and  more 
the  character  of  a  moral  question.  In  propor 
tion  as  cotton  became  king  and  the  cotton  crop 
of  the  Gulf  States  increased  from  year  to  year, 
the  change  came  over  Virginia  which  made  her  a 
slave-breeding  State.  The  price  of  slaves  became 
higher  and  higher  as  this  new  market  opened  for 
them,  and  the  wish  for  emancipation,  which  had 
appeared  everywhere  in  the  Virginian  history, 
was  checked  by  the  new  economic  conditions. 
Now  observe  that  Garrison  had  started  the 
Liberator  in  Baltimore,  January  1,  1831. 

I  like  to  copy  from  Mr.  Buell's  admirable  Life 
of  Paul  Jones  the  letter  which  that  hero,  now 
almost  forgotten,  wrote  to  his  Virginia  agents 
about  his  plantation  in  1786  :  - 

"  Beyond  all  these  considerations,  gentlemen, 
there  is  another,  and  to  my  way  of  thinking, 
far  weightier  reason  dissuading  me  from  the 
meditation  of  resuming  the  life  of  a  Virginia 
Farmer.  To  do  that,  with  prospect  of  success 


126        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

under  existing  conditions,  would  require  me  to 
make  myself  the  beneficiary  of  slave  '  labor/  to 
be  again  a  holder  of  property  in  human  flesh  and 
blood.  I  occupied  that  attitude  once, — but  it 
was  at  a  time  when  my  sensibilities  on  that  score 
had  not  been  sharpened  as  they  have  been  since. 

"Lord  Dunsmore  [Governor  of  Virginia]  re 
lieved  me,  sadly  and  violently,  but  no  less  effectu 
ally,  of  the  main  part  of  my  offending  as  an  owner 
of  human  slaves.  You  are  aware  that,  early  in 
1776,  I  set  free  my  only  two  remaining  boys, 
Cato  and  Scipio,  at  Providence,  R.I.  At  this 
writing  I  must  say  that  I  have  struggled  so 
long  and  desperately  for  the  cause  of  human 
growth  and  the  rights  of  man  at  large,  that  I 
can  no  longer  bring  myself  to  a  distinction 
based  on  color  or  misfortune  as  between  men, 
whom,  as  the  Good  Book  says,  '  God  hath 
created  in  His  own  image.' ' 

There  is  not  any  more  interesting  index  of 
this  change  than  may  be  observed  in  the  mem 
oirs  of  John  Quincy  Adams.  He  had  reason 
enough  to  dislike  Southern  politics  and  to  dis 
trust  Southern  politicians.  But  I  think  it  is 
not  until  after  the  Missouri  Compromise  that 
his  papers,  his  letters,  or  his  speeches  indicate 
his  special  aversion  to  slavery.  Indeed,  in 


A   GENERATION   OF   MEN  127 

that  magnificent  career  of  his  in  Congress,  after 
he  was  President,  he  appears  in  defence  of  the 
right  of  petition  as  claimed  by  antislavery  men 
before  he  takes  very  eager  ground  in  the  sup 
port  of  their  positions. 

The  truth  is  that  as  the  country  gradually 
became  a  Nation  and  ceased  to  be  a  Confed 
eracy,  it  became  more  and  more  clear  that  it 
could  not  be  a  nation  of  freedom  and  a  nation 
of  slavery  at  the  same  time.  This  is  completely 
stated  in  Abraham  Lincoln's  epigram  of  the 
time.  You  cannot  have  eight  republics  allied 
with  five  oligarchies,  to  repeat  Gouverneur 
Morris's  epigram.  But  your  Nation  must  be 
one  thing  or  another.  Eight  houses  may  be 
divided  against  five  houses,  but  one  house 
divided  against  itself  cannot  stand.  I  remem 
ber  that  as  early  as  1836,  when  I  was  in  college 
and  was  discussing  this  matter  with  my  dear 
friend  Donaldson,  from  Maryland,  I  said  to 
him  that  the  whole  system  would  come  to  an 
end  under  commercial  laws ;  that  as  the  rail 
ways  opened  up  from  South  to  North,  the 
slaves  would  run  away  if  they  wanted  to.  And 
neither  of  us,  I  think,  conceived  the  possibility 
of  any  National  legislation  strong  enough  to 
carry  them  back  again. 


128        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

It  was,  of  course,  easy  enough  to  say  that 
under  the  Constitution  slavery  was  a  local 
institution,  and  that  every  State  might  manage 
as  it  chose.  This  was  so  as  long  as  Washington 
spoke  of  Virginia  as  "  my  country,"  or  Pinckney 
said  the  same  thing  of  Carolina.  But  you  could 
not  hold  to  this  while  you  guaranteed  to  every 
citizen  of  every  State  the  same  rights  as  you 
gave  to  every  citizen  of  your  own  State.  And, 
for  instance,  the  statute  of  South  Carolina  of 
the  year  1823,  which  prohibits  the  arrival  in 
her  ports  of  free  blacks  from  other  States, 
under  penalty  of  imprisonment,  is  just  as  much 
•an  act  of  nullification  as  any  of  the  legislation 
of  after  years. 

Mr.  Garrison  and  the  other  original  abolitionists 
used  to  the  utmost  the  privilege,  which  they  un 
doubtedly  had,  of  attacking  slavery  as  an  evil  in 
itself,  without  proposing  any  method  of  meeting 
the  difficulties  of  the  process,  and  without  attempt 
ing  to  make  them  less.  Slavery  is  wrong.  It 
was  enough  to  say  that.  "  Strike  a  man  ?  "  Dr. 
Channing  would  put  that  question,  and  he  had 
freed  his  conscience.  Emancipate  the  man,  and 
the  future  might  take  care  of  itself.  But  many 
years  did  not  go  by  before  the  sensitive  con 
sciences  of  some  abolitionists  compelled  them  to 


A   GENERATION   OF   MEN  129 

withdraw  from  acting  under  a  Constitution  which 
they  wanted  to  destroy.  How  could  you  vote, 
as  a  citizen,  in  an  organization  which  you  called 
a  covenant  with  hell  ?  From  this  conscientious 
ness  came  the  inevitable  division  between  the  old 
organization  and  the  new  —  a  division  which  the 
outsiders  ridiculed  by  classing  the  two  factions  as 
"  New  Ogs  "  and  "  Old  Ogs  "  when  their  annual 
meetings  came  round.  Within  these  organiza 
tions,  however,  the  members  treated  each  other 
with  a  cordial  catholicity,  and,  though  they  could 
not  contribute  to  each  other's  treasuries,  or  join 
directly  in  each  other's  system  of  propaganda, 
they  recognized  fidelity  to  the  essential  privilege. 
And  so  soon  as  the  Liberty  party  formed  itself,  all 
who  could  vote,  in  conscience,  were  generally  to 
be  found  in  its  ranks.  As  early  as  1844  the  in 
dependent  vote  of  the  Liberty  party  was  with 
drawn  from  Mr.  Clay,  and  this  lost  the  vote  of 
New  York  — -then,  as  always,  the  Empire  State  — 
to  Mr.  Clay.  He  was  pledged  to  oppose  the  an 
nexation  of  Texas.  The  election  of  Mr.  Polk,  his 
competitor,  was  thus  secured.  New  York,  as  al 
ways  up  to  that  date,  voted  with  the  South,  and 
the  supremacy  of  the  South  for  the  next  sixteen 
years  was  secured. 

So  the  "settlement"  by  the  Missouri  question 


VOL.    II.  —  K 


130        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

lasted  for  its  generation  of  men.  I  have  already 
said  that  the  figures  are  curiously  accurate.  The 
Constitution  was  completed  in  1787.  Thirty- 
three  years  after,  the  Missouri  Compromise  was 
passed.  Thirty-three  years  more,  and  Mr.  Dixon, 
of  Kentucky,  introduced  the  amendment  to  the 
Nebraska  Bill  which  repealed  the  Compromise 
section  of  March  6,  1820.  This  would  violate 
the  Compromise. 

Mr.  Edward  Everett  —  who  had  a  very  nice 
sense  of  the  obligation  of  the  Missouri  Compro 
mise —  said  to  me  more  than  once,  as  the  war  went 
on,  that  the  violation  of  it  was  the  work  of  nine 
men.  I  wish  I  had  asked  him  who  he  thought 
the  nine  men  were.  I  wish  some  cool-headed 
Southern  man,  at  this  hour,  would  name  these 
real  leaders  in  the  secession  policy.  This  was 
undoubtedly  true  —  that  the  mere  fact  that  a 
man  owned  slaves  made  him  a  member,  whether 
he  would  or  no,  of  an  oligarchy  of-  slaveholders 
• — a  small  corporation,  as  one  might  call  it. 
Such  a  syndicate,  as  our  modern  term  would  have 
it,  moves  with  a  certain  promptness.  And  this 
particular  syndicate  until  1853  had  the  easy 
direction  of  the  Democratic  party.  Had  this 
syndicate  been  willing  to  hold  on  to  what  it  had 
in  the  annexation  of  Texas,  the  Missouri  Compro- 


A   GENERATION   OF   MEN  131 

mise  and  the  system  to  which  it  belonged  would, 
according  to  me,' have  lasted  much  longer  than 
they  did.  But  in  the  destruction  of  that  barrier 
the  pent-up  forces  of  Northern  indignation  were 
set  free,  which  had  been  gathering  from  the 
beginning. 


PERSONAL 


CHAPTER   IV 

PERSONAL 
TEXAS,   KANSAS,   AND   NEBEASKA 

WITH  the  last  half  of  the  century  my  own 
personal  recollections  begin  to  play  their 
part  in  these  memoirs.  I  believe  I  have  said 
here  somewhere  that  I  was  cradled  in  the  sheets 
of  a  newspaper.  This  is  certain,  that  from  the 
year  1834,  when  I  was  a  boy  of  twelve,  I  had  the 
pleasure  of  seeing  in  print  in  the  Advertiser 
some  scrap  or  other  which  my  father  had  per 
mitted  me  to  translate  or  to  write  for  the  news 
paper.  That  was  his  way  of  bringing  up  his 
children  —  to  make  them  share  in  the  life  of  the 
elders  of  the  family,  not  to  say  of  the  time.  If 
when  I  was  thirteen  years  old  he  had  told  me  to 
sail  the  Channel  Fleet,  I  should  have  taken  it 
for  granted  that  I  could  do  so,  because  he  bade 
me;  and  I  should  have  assumed  the  duty  as 
cheerfully  as  Lord  John  Russell  would  have  done. 
Under  this  principle,  when  I  was  sixteen,  I  was 
reporter  in  the  Massachusetts  Legislature,  with 

135 


136         MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

the  duty,  not  of  writing  out  speeches  at  length, 
but  of  abridging  them  and  giving  their  tenor. 
I  suppose  that  from  that  hour  to  this  no  month 
of  my  life  has  passed  in  which  I  have  not  written 
more  or  less  for  the  journals  of  the  day.  In  the 
high  tide  of  1854  and  1855  I  was  contributing 
the  leading  articles  for  ten  papers,  in  New  Eng 
land  and  New  York,  on  subjects  which  had  to  do 
with  Kansas  emigration. 

All  this  means  that  I  have  had  more  than  the 
average  share  of  personal  intercourse  with  public 
men. 

I  have  already  spoken  of  the  election  of  1828 
in  which  John  Qiiincy  Adams  was  defeated  by 
General  Jackson.  I  was  then  six  years  old.  I 
afterward  met  Mr.  Adams,  who  was  always  very 
kind  to  me,  when  he  was  easily  the  first  mem 
ber  of  the  House  of  Representatives,  in  the 
year  1845.  From  the  moment  he  was  proposed 
as  a  member  of  Congress  in  his  own  district, 
which  was  as  early  as  1830,  it  was  settled  that 
that  district  would  never  have  any  member  ex 
cepting  him  while  he  lived.  This  was  the  old 
Plymouth  Colony  District,  including  also  some 
towns,  of  which  Quincy  was  one,  from  the  "Bay." 
Even  while  the  distinction  remained  in  Massachu 
setts  which  separated  " Cotton  Whigs"  from 


TEXAS,  KANSAS,  AND    NEBRASKA  137 

"Conscience  Whigs,"  and  gave  to  the  "Cotton 
Whigs"  a  majority  in  the  State,  the  "Conscience 
Whigs"  and  their  natural  allies  the  Abolition 
ists  always  sent  the  "  Old  Man  Eloquent,"  as  we 
called  him,  to  his  place.  That  phrase  is  Milton's 
when  he  speaks  of  Isocrates.  Mr.  Adams  was 
sixty-four  years  old  when,  after  he  had  been 
President  once,  he  entered  Congress  for  the  second 
time.  That  was  magnificent. 

As  the  North  began  to  understand  that  the 
so-called  successes  of  the  Democratic  party  meant 
simply  that  the  Northern  States  were  the  bobs  in 
the  tail  of  the  Southern  kite,  Mr.  Adams  became 
more  and  more  popular  among  the  malcontents 
of  the  North.  He  enjoyed  this  popularity,  which 
showed  itself  in  some  very  tender  ways.  There 
was  a  fine  expression  of  a  steamboat  captain  on 
the  Ohio,  who  wished  to  God  that  "  we  could 
take  the  engine  out  of  the  old  Adams  and  put  it 
in  a  new  hull."  Mr.  Adams  never  spoke  in  Con 
gress,  even  when  the  Democratic  leaders  there 
meant  to  censure  him  publicly,  but  that  every 
one  crowded  around  him  to  hear  him.  And  on 
one  or  two  critical  occasions  he  assumed,  without 
hesitation,  the  position  which  the  Dean  of  the 
House,  or  its  natural  leader,  deserved. 

This  gave  the  more  interest  to  the  readiness 


138        MEMORIES    OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

with  which  at  home  he  took  the  duties  of  any 
citizen  of  Norfolk  County.  I  remember  him  in 
1847,  in  the  simplest  detail  of  our  democratic 
life  in  New  England,  when  he  presided  as  Moder 
ator  of  the  Congregational  Council  which  or 
dained  William  Rounseville  Alger.  He  was  a 
lay  delegate  for  the  church  in  Quincy  with  Dr. 
Lunt  in  what  is  called  the  Council,  in  Congrega 
tional  matters,  of  perhaps  five  and  twenty 
neighboring  parishes.  He  was  chosen  Moderator 
of  the  assembly,  and,  in  the  fine  Congregational 
ritual,  it  was  his  business  to  announce  to  the 
assembly  that  the  "  Council  has  agreed  to  pro 
ceed  with  the  ordination"  of  the  gentleman  who 
had  been  chosen  by  the  parish  as  its  minister. 

When  his  son  published  twelve  volumes  of  his 
father's  memoirs,  he  printed  one  of  the  most  in 
teresting  contributions  to  our  American  history. 
Son  and  grandsons  have  built  an  elegant  fireproof 
building  to  contain  the  annals  of  the  family. 
You  enter  by  the  lordly  fireplace,  you  turn  to  the 
right,  and  there  is  the  diary  of  the  first  Adams 
when  he  left  college  in  1755.  You  walk  on  and 
you  walk  on,  turning  the  corners  as  they  come, 
and  at  the  fireplace  end,  after  your,  walk,  a  hun 
dred  paces  more  or  less,  you  have  seen  the 
manuscript  history  of  America  in  the  diaries  and 


TEXAS,  KANSAS,  AND    NEBRASKA  139 

correspondence  of  two  Presidents  and  of  that 
Minister  to  England  who  spoke  the  decisive  word 
which  saved  England  and  America  from  a  third 
war.  Some  day,  when  the  secrets  of  to-day  can 
be  uncovered,  some  one  will  print  in  twenty 
volumes  more  the  rest  of  John  Quincy  Adams's 
diary,  which  the  prudence  of  his  son  Charles 
Francis  Adams  suppressed  when  those  twelve 
were  published. 

As  I  have  said,  perhaps  I  have  spoken  with 
all  the  Presidents,  after  the  first  Harrison,  ex 
cepting  Buchanan,  Taylor,  and  Cleveland.  I  am 
not  sure  about  Garfield,  though  I  had,  at  one 
time,  some  correspondence  with  him. 

In  the  winter  of  1843  and  1844  I  spent  a  good 
deal  of  time  with  my  father  in  the  State  of 
Pennsylvania.  He  was  engaged  in  some  impor 
tant  financial  arrangements  in  connection  with 
the  internal  improvements  of  that  State,  and  at 
that  time  T  had  a  good  deal  to  do  with  wire  ropes 
and  inclined  planes  and  other  machinery  of  trans 
portation  which  is  long  since  forgotten,  not  to 
say  with  Tax  Laws  and  valuations. 

On  some  occasion,  I  forget  what,  when  he  was 
recalled  to  Boston,  I  took  my  holiday  by  going 
to  Washington.  A  branch  of  the  Baltimore  and 
Ohio  Railway  had  recently  been  opened.  As  I 


140        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

stood  on  Pennsylvania  Avenue  looking  east  and 
looking  west,  I  had  that  curious  feeling  of  dis 
appointment,  which  I  have  experienced  since,  in 
my  first  view  of  other  cities  and  places,  because 
I  was  a  little  too  well  prepared  for  what  I  saw. 
The  Capitol  looked  exactly  as  it  did  in  the  pic 
tures.  I  knew  that  the  avenue  was  wide  and 
beggarly  and  crude;  and  I  said  to  myself  in  a 
sort  of  heartsick  way:  "Is  this  what  one  gains 
by  travel?  A  man  might  as  well  stay  at  home." 
But  all  this  did  not  last.  The  matchless  hos 
pitality  of  Washington  asserted  itself  then,  when 
Washington  was  a  little  Virginia  town  dumped 
in  a  mud-hole,  as  it  does  now,  when  Washington 
is  one  of  the  finest  cities  in  the  world.  I  do  not 
remember  the  detail,  but  I  do  remember  that 
under  the  protection  and  auspices  of  Judge  Story, 
who  had  been  a  friend  to  me  all  through  my 
college  life,  I  was  pleasantly  housed  in  the 
lodging-house  where  the  Northern  members  of 
the  Supreme  Court  lived.  I  had  put  myself  in 
communication  with  Edward  Webster,  son  of 
Daniel  Webster,  who  was  in  some  sort  a  god- 
brother  of  mine,  if  there  is  any  such  relationship, 
for  we  were  within  a  year's  age  of  each  other, 
and  he  had  been  named,  as  I  had  been  named, 
for  Edward  Everett.  He  had  gone  to  Dart- 


TEXAS,  KANSAS,  AND   NEBRASKA  141 

mouth  College,  because  it  was  his  father's  college, 
and  I  had  gone  to  Cambridge  about  the  same 
time,  but  we  often  met  and  were  close  friends. 
Edward  carried  me  at  once  to  his  father's  modest 
house,  and  I  was  welcomed  there  with  the  same 
hospitality  as  if  I  had  still  been  a  boy  of  six  years 
playing  in  the  stable  of  the  old  Webster  house 
in  Summer  Street.  Then  and  there  I  made  my 
first  acquaintance  with  the  city  of  Washington. 
I  went  to  the  little  Unitarian  church  at  Washing 
ton  on  the  only  Sunday  which  I  spent  there.  This 
church  was  almost  a  historical  edifice,  having 
been  built  in  the  early  days  of  the  Unitarian  con 
troversy,  as  we  call  it,  by  an  accomplished  circle 
of  English  gentlemen  who  lived  in  Washington 
then.  They  represented  historically  Priestley's 
view  of  the  Unitarian  revival  and  the  view  of 
the  Englishmen  who  surrounded  him,  as  nothing 
which  I  had  read  or  seen  in  Boston  did. 

So  it  chanced  that  as  I  went  into  the  church 
on  Sunday  morning  George  James  Abbot  met 
me  and  took  me  into  his  seat.  He  was  after 
ward  one  of  my  most  intimate  and  personal 
friends,  and  it  is  with  special  pleasure  that  I  write 
these  words  about  one  of  the  men  who  was  ready 
to  help  the  world  forward  in  any  way,  and  who 
was  a  distinguished  agent  in  helping  it  forward, 


142        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

though  his  name  scarcely  ever  appears  in  the 
newspapers.  Abbot  had  been  four  years  before 
me  in  college,  and  he  knew  me  by  sight ;  for  in 
fact,  he  entered  at  the  Cambridge  Divinity  School, 
meaning  to  follow  the  profession  of  his  father, 
who  had  recently  died.  Abbot  knew  that  I  had 
been  preparing  myself  for  a  minister's  life,  and 
asked  me  at  once  if  in  the  autumn  of  that 
year  I  would  not  come  and  preach  in  Washing 
ton.  He  was  one  of  the  Standing  Committee 
of  the  Unitarian  church.  This  incident,  or  ac 
cident,  as  you  may  choose  to  call  it,  opened  up 
an  acquaintance  with  the  city  of  Washington 
which  has  lasted  from  that  day  to  this  day.  I 
lived  in  Washington  as  their  minister  from  Octo 
ber  1,  1844,  to  the  3d  of  March,  1845.  They 
asked  me  to  remain  and  be  their  permanent 
minister,  but  I  declined.  I  was  very  much 
tempted  by  the  proposal,  but  I  did  not  accept 
it.  I  knew  perfectly  well  that  there  was  to  be 
a  gulf  of  fire  between  the  North  and  the  South 
before  things  went  much  further ;  and  I  really 
distrusted  my  own  capacity  at  the  age  of  twenty- 
three  to  build  a  bridge  which  should  take  us 
over.  But  as  I  write,  I  suppose  that  in  fifty- 
six  years  since  then,  I  have  gone  to  Washington 
fifty-six  times,  to  preach  to  this  congregation. 


THE   ANNEXATION    OF   TEXAS  143 

THE  ANNEXATION  OF   TEXAS 

That  winter  of  1844-1845  was  one  which  we 
then  thought  a  crisis  winter,  and  I  have  thought  so 
from  that  time  to  this.  John  Tyler  was  Presi 
dent.  To  say  nothing  worse  of  him,  he  was  the 
weakest  man,  excepting  Franklin  Pierce,  who 
was  ever  President,  and  he  was  the  most  ignorant 
man  of  the  duties  of  the  Presidency,  with  per 
haps  another  exception.  The  Whigs  had  put 
him  on  their  ticket  with  Governor  William 
Henry  Harrison,  by  way  of  showing  that  they 
were  not  a  Northern  party,  as  they  were.  They 
had  had  triumphant  success.  They  had  swept 
from  its  throne  the  old  coalition  between  the 
slaveholding  States  and  the  slums  of  New  York 
City,  and  they  enjoyed  their  triumph  —  for  one 
month.  Harrison  then  died,  and  the  great,  suc 
cessful  Whig  party  had  on  its  hands  John  Tyler. 
He  was  what  the  politicians  call  a  "  sorehead," 
who  outwent  in  his  devotion  to  the  slaveholding 
interest  anything  which  the  defeated  Mr.  Van 
Buren  would  have  done,  "  the  Northern  man 
with  Southern  principles." 

To  come  down  to  the  year  1844.  Mr.  Tyler 
had  made  a  Cabinet  which  men  used  to  call  "  a 
Corporal's  Guard,"  because  it  was  supposed  to 


144        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

have  no  party  behind  it.  But  when  the  project 
for  the  annexation  of  Texas  came  up,  the  most 
of  the  old  Democratic  party  rallied  to  his  support. 
The  whole  slaveholdirig  interest  was,  as  I 
have  already  said,  from  first  to  last,  a  solid  cor 
poration  which  moved  instinctively  as  one  body. 
The  nation  of  Texas  had  issued  bonds  which  were 
owned  by  a  handful  of  enterprising  and  very 
skilful  operators,  and  by  the  time  Congress  met 
in  December,  1844,  the  plans  for  the  annexation 
of  Texas  were  well  forward  and  had  the  complete 
approval  of  President  Tyler  and  his  Cabinet.  In 
a  review  of  the  history  of  the  intrigue,  addressed 
to  his  constituents  in  1842,  Mr.  Adams  said  that 
in  a  debate  in  1837  on  the  subject  he  "  disclosed 
the  whole  system  of  duplicity  and  perfidy  toward 
Mexico  which  had  marked  the  Jackson  Adminis 
tration  from  its  commencement  to  its  close.  It 
silenced  the  clamors  for  the  annexation  of  Texas 
to  this  Union  for  three  years  till  the  catastrophe 
of  the  Van  Buren  Administration.  The  people 
of  the  free  States  were  lulled  into  the  belief  that 
the  whole  project  was  abandoned  and  that  they 
should  hear  no  more  of  slave-trade  cravings  for 
the  annexation  of  Texas.  Had  Harrison  lived 
they  would  have  heard  no  more  of  them  to  this 
day,  but  no  sooner  was  John  Tyler  installed  in 


THE   ANNEXATION   OF   TEXAS  145 

the  President's  house  than  nullification  and 
Texas  and  war  with  Mexico  rose  again  upon 
the  surface,  with  eye  steadily  fixed  upon  the 
polar  star  of  Southern  slave-dealing  supremacy 
in  the  Government  of  the  Union." 

For  myself  I  have  always  to  this  time  counted 
it  a  piece  of  great  good  fortune  of  my  own  that 
I  spent  this  winter  of  -1844-1845  in  Washington. 
I  arrived  there  early  in  October.  I  remained 
there  until  the  3d  of  March,  1845,  the  day  be 
fore  Mr.  Folk's  inauguration.  I  remember  that 
I  was  too  angry  to  be  willing  to  stay  to  see  his 
inauguration  on  the  4th.  But  Mr.  Alexander 
Hill  Everett  took  me  to  call  upon  Mr.  Polk, 
I  think  at  the  National  Hotel,  so  that  I  heard 
them  in  frank  conversation  with  each  other. 
In  the  same  way  I  had  seen  Mr.  Calhoun  and 
heard  them  talk.  Mr.  Calhoun  was,  at  this 
period,  Mr.  Tyler's  Secretary  of  State. 

If  I  give  anywhere  any  account  of  the  per 
sonal  impression  Mr.  Tyler  made  on  me,  it  must 
be  on  another  page.  On  this  page  I  wish  I 
could  make  the  reader  see  what  the  struggle 
of  that  winter  was  as  it  appeared  to  unsophisti 
cated  Northern  eyes. 

Physically,  Texas  is  a  paradise,  and  always 
has  been,  since  its  written  history  began.  I 

VOL.   II.  —  L, 


146        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

have  never  been  in  southern  Mexico,  but  I  think 
I  know  something  of  Mexico ;  and  I  have  seen 
every  one  of  our  States  between  New  Brunswick 
and  the  Rio  Grande.  I  am  quite  sure  that 
Texas,  as  large  a  region  as  France,  has  by  far 
the  finest  natural  advantages  of  any  region 
between  Labrador  and  the  Isthmus  of  Panama. 
It  seems  therefore  a  little  queer  that  while 
Mexico  got  itself  well  settled  by  Europeans, 
even  in  Cortes' s  times,  and  while  there  were 
Frenchmen  in  Canada  and  Englishmen  in  Vir 
ginia  as  early  as  Jamestown,  there  were  no  Span 
ish  settlements  of  wider  range  than  military 
posts  in  the  whole  of  Texas.  This  is  the  more 
queer  because  you  find  passages  which  show  that 
intelligent  people  knew  how  fine  a  country  it 
was.  Thus,  old  Judge  Sewall,  two  hundred 
years  ago,  has  one  of  his  fine  weird  visions  in 
which  he  suggests  that  the  New  Jerusalem  will 
be  established  there. 

I  suppose  the  truth  to  be  that  the  Spanish 
Governors  of  Mexico  were  afraid  of  English  and 
American  aggression  on  the  north,  and  meant  to 
keep  a  desert  between  the  Mississippi  and  their 
silver  mines.  Under  that  policy  they  murdered 
Philip  Nolan  in  1801 ;  kept  all  his  companions 
prisoners  until  they  died,  except  Blackburn, 


THE   ANNEXATION    OF   TEXAS  147 

whom  they  hanged ;  and  they  arrested  Captain 
Pike  and  his  party  when  they  had  strayed  into 
the  valley  of  the  Rio  Grande  in  1807.  The  idea 
of  a  dividing  zone  which  should  be  virtually 
a  desert  between  rival  nations  was  a  familiar 
notion  to  the  old-fashioned  statesman.  Some 
how  or  other  it  happened  in  Burr's  time,  and 
for  twenty  years  after,  that  what  people  would 
call  a  Texas  fever  got  hold  of  the  adventurous 
pioneer  population  of  the  Southwest ;  and  early 
in  the  twenties  there  appear  the  names  of  such 
men  as  Stephen  Austin,  Samuel  Houston,  and, 
later  down,  of  David  Crockett,  who  had  deter 
mined  to  break  in  on  this  hedged-up  paradise. 
As  the  Mexican  States  broke  off  from  Spain  and 
became  republics,  it  became  more  and  more  easy 
to  obtain  grants  of  land  of  one  sort  and  another. 
The  old  Spanish  Government  had  almost  always 
refused  such  grants,  but  the  revolutionists  were 
much  more  easy. 

In  1833  the  settlers  on  such  grants  gained 
confidence  enough  in  their  own  number  and  in 
hope  of  enlarging  those  numbers  to  make  a 
constitution  for  themselves,  and  in  1836,  after 
various  vicissitudes,  to  declare  their  indepen 
dence.  This  was  followed,  almost  of  course,  by 
an  invasion  of  Mexican  troops ;  and  it  is  to  be 


148        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

observed,  from  the  experience  of  the  next  five 
and  twenty  years,  that  the  Mexican  soldier  is  an 
admirable  soldier.  They  crushed  at  first  the 
fighting  force  of  Texas.  That  horrible  massacre 
of  the  Alamo  took  place,  black  among  the 
blackest  incidents  even  of  Spanish  folly  and 
cruelty,  and  was  followed  by  the  inevitable 
retaliation  of  the  battle  of  San  Jacinto.  In 
this  fight  the  Mexican  army  was  annihilated 
in  half  an  hour  by  the  Texans,  and,  fortunately 
for  them,  General  Santa  Anna,  its  commander, 
the  President  of  Mexico,  was  taken  prisoner. 
The  Texan  army  which  had  triumphed  was 
made  up  of  men  whose  comrades  had  been  bru 
tally  murdered  after  the  capture  of  Alamo.  It 
was  said  at  the  time  that  when  the  poor  Mexi 
can  soldiers,  who  had  been  surprised  in  their 
afternoon  siesta,  found  themselves  the  prisoners 
of  the  Texans  they  would  sob  out  "  Me  no 
Alamo,"  meaning  that  they  were  not  concerned 
in  the  brutal  massacre.  This  was  in  the  year 
1836.  From  that  moment  the  independence  of 
Texas  seemed  possible.  The  United  States  Gov 
ernment  had  attempted  to  purchase  the  province 
under  every  Administration  after  Monroe's.  In 
deed,  the  affectation  had  been  kept  up  that  the 
Province  of  Texas,  between  the  Sabine  and  the 


THE   ANNEXATION   OF   TEXAS  149 

Rio  del  Norte,  belonged  to  the  Province  of  Loui 
siana,  and  that  our  line  should  have  been  drawn 
at  the  Del  Norte,  and  not  at  the  Sabine. 

Now  that  Texas  was  established  as  an  inde 
pendent  State,  with  the  flag  of  the  "  Lone  Star," 
a  steady  purpose  showed  itself  on  the  part  of 
its  rulers  to  annex  themselves  to  the  United 
States.  The  Southern  leaders,  including  the 
President,  John  Tyler,  saw  of  course  the  im 
mense  advantage  that  so  magnificent  a  province 
would  give  to  them.  The  slave-holding  inter 
est  could  not  but  lend  itself  to  the  annexation 
of  this  province  to  the  United  States,  without 
reserve.  Besides  this,  alas !  there  were  the 
men  who  owned  the  bonds  of  the  "Lone  Star" 
State,  which  had  been  hardly  worth  the  paper 
they  were  written  on.  But  if  Texas  became  a 
part  of  the  United  States  these  bonds  would  be 
enlarged  immensely  in  value.  It  was  said  at 
the  time,  and  I  believe,  that  waverers  who  had 
to  be  conciliated  to  the  Southern  cause  accepted 
these  bonds  as  part  payment  for  their  votes. 

The  annexation  of  Texas  then  became  the 
crucial  test  which  should  show  how  far  the 
Northern  States  and  the  Western  States  did  or 
did  not  care  for  slavery  in  the  abstract.  A  man 
might  say,  with  a  perfectly  good  conscience,  that 


150         MEMORIES    OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

South  Carolina  could  regulate  her  own  laws 
with  regard  to  slavery,  while  he  could  not  say, 
with  a  good  conscience,  that  slavery  should 
exist  in  Texas,  or  that  the  United  States  should 
annex  a  slave-holding  region.  On  this  issue 
Mr.  Polk  had  been  chosen  President,  as  repre 
senting  the  South  and  the  Southern  interests. 
Mr.  Clay  had  been  rejected  because  the  anti- 
slavery  men  of  New  York  did  not  believe  that 
he  was  sound  as  to  the  extension  of  slavery. 
The  whole  session  of  Congress  of  the  winter  of 
1844-1845  was  practically  given  to  the  solution 
of  this  question.  Democratic  States  like  New 
Hampshire  turned  right  round  on  the  question 
of  freedom  in  Texas. 

In  that  session  Mr.  Adams  and  with  him 
the  whole  North  triumphed,  when  in  December 
the  House  received  petitions  for  the  abolition  of 
slavery  in  the  District  of  Columbia,  whish  it  had 
steadily  refused  to  do  before.  But  as  the  month 
of  March  opened,  it  proved  that  in  the  Texas 
business  the  South  was  victorious.  Up  to  the 
first  day  of  March,  we  Northern  men  had  sup 
posed  that  the  Senate  would  reject  what  was 
called  the  "joint  resolution,"  which  had  passed 
the  House,  which  provided  for  the  annexation. 
The  form  of  the  joint  resolution  had  been  taken 


THE   ANNEXATION   OF   TEXAS  151 

because  it  was  known  that  no  treaty  for  annex 
ation  could  go  through,  the  Senate.  We  sup 
posed  that  we  had  a  majority  of  one  in  the 
Senate.  On  all  this  history  the  wise  reader  will 
study  Mr.  Shepard's  Life  of  Van  Buren. 

On  the  morning  of  the  2d  of  March  I  called 
on  Mr.  Rufus  Choate  at  the  Senate  Chamber, 
and  called  him  out  from  his  seat. 

"  I  am  going  to  Boston,  Mr.  Choate.  What 
shall  I  tell  my  father  ?  " 

"  Tell  him  we  are  beaten,  Mr.  Hale  —  we  are 
beaten,  maynoprcdio  victi  sumus.  We  have  been 
beaten  in  a  great  battle." 

The  truth,  was,  as  I  suppose,  that  President 
Tyler  had  told  Senator  Merrick  —  a  weak  Senator 
from  Maryland  —  that  if  he  would  vote  for  an 
nexation,  his  son  should  be  made  Judge  in  the 
District  Court  of  Columbia.  Such  was,  at  least, 
the  scandal  of  the  time.  The  son  was  made 
Judge  of  that  Court,  receiving  a  position  which 
he  held  until  his  death,  and  the  father  who  had 
been  chosen  as  a  Whig,  voted  for  annexation. 

For  myself,  I  went  back  to  Boston  most  eager 
to  carry  out  what  I  thought  to  be  the  true  policy 
of  the  Northern  States.  I  have  never  changed 
my  opinion.  The  whole  North  was  angry  with 
what  seemed  a  trick  which  had  been  played  upon 


152        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

it.  This  same  North  was  sending  westward 
thousands  of  emigrants  every  year  ;  and  here  was 
this  magnificent  province  lying  empty.  How  cer 
tain  it  is  that  if  the  wave  of  free  emigration  could 
have  been  turned  into  Texas  then,  evils  untold  of 
would  have  been  prevented.  On  the  other  hand, 
I  am  afraid  it  is  as  certain  that  human  slavery 
would  not  have  been  abolished  in  the  older  States 
for  another  generation. 

But  my  own  duty  seemed  to  me  clear  enough. 
I  gave  my  first  days  after  I  returned  to  Boston  to 
writing  an  eager  appeal  for  the  immediate  settle 
ment  of  Texas  from  the  Northern  States.  "  How 
to  Conquer  Texas  before  Texas  Conquers  Us, "  this 
was  the  title  of  my  pamphlet.  I  printed  it  at 
my  own  cost,  and  I  am  yet  to  meet  with  the  first 
person,  outside  the  circle  of  my  immediate  friends, 
who  ever  read  those  sixteen  pages.  No,  I  must  ex 
cept  the  proof-reader  of  that  edition  and  the  proof 
reader  of  the  eighth  volume  of  my  standard  edition, 
in  which  I  reprinted  it  fifty-six  years  afterward. 

I  was  ready  to  go  myself  in  any  capacity.  I 
had  fancied,  in  the  innocence  of  twenty-three 
years  of  age,  that  we  could  arrest  attention  to  such 
a  plan  —  that  the  men  with  money  would  con 
tribute  money  and  that  the  men  of  courage  would 
ally  themselves  together ;  and  even,  as  certain 


THE   NEBRASKA   BILL  153 

men  went  from  Ley  den  to  Massachusetts  Bay  in 
1620,  a  body  of  us  would  go  to  Texas  in  1845. 
But  no,  mine  was  a  voice  crying  in  the  wilderness. 
No  man  went  or  proposed  to  go. 

All  the  same,  I  like  to  say  now  that  the  solu 
tion  proposed  was  well  founded  on  the  social  con 
ditions  of  the  middle  of  the  century. 

THE  NEBRASKA  BILL 

When,  nine  years  afterward,  in  the  beginning 
of  the  year  1854,  with  a  sublime  audacity,  won 
by  success,  the  Southern  leaders  determined  to 
overthrow  the  Missouri  Compromise,  the  same 
opportunity  for  the  direction  of  free  emigration 
presented  itself  to  another  man  in  Massachusetts 
as  the  solution  to  be  attempted  then. 

The  "Nebraska  Bill,"  still  so  called  in  con 
versation  at  the  North,  though  it  was  for  many 
years  the  law  of  the  land,  was  introduced  in 
the  Senate.  It  violated  the  promises  of  the 
Missouri  Compromise  by  throwing  open  the  ter 
ritory  west  of  Arkansas  and  Missouri  and  Iowa 
to  the  institution  of  slavery.  The  North  was 
on  fire  at  once  at  a  violation  so  disgraceful  of 
a  compact  which  had  been  loyally  respected  for 
thirty-four  years.  And  Eli  Thayer,  a  school- 


154        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

master  of  Worcester,  Massachusetts,  called  on 
the  Legislature  to  organize  the  Massachusetts 
Emigrant  Aid  Company.  He  was  a  member 
of  the  Legislature  for  the  city  of  Worcester. 
It  was  not  a  plan  of  an  old  antislavery  war- 
horse.  It  was  a  plan  which  proposed  to  meet 
the  South  on  its  own  terms,  familiarly  known  as 
"  squatter  sovereignty."  It  authorized  a  capi 
tal  of  five  million  dollars  in  establishing  settle 
ments  at  the  West.  The  charter  was  rushed 
through  both  Houses  of  the  Legislature  at  once, 
and  was  signed  by  Governor  Washburn  on  the 
26th  day  of  April,  1854.  This  was  a  month 
before  the  Nebraska  Bill  was  signed  by  Franklin 
Pierce,  then  President.  On  the  4th  of  May  the 
petitioners  accepted  the  charter.  Massachusetts 
picked  up  the  gauntlet,  it  has  been  said,  before 
it  was  thrown  down. 

In  point  of  fact,  the  friends  of  the  movement 
acted  under  a  quiet,  private  organization  through 
the  whole  of  the  year  1854,  and  a  more  valuable 
working  charter  was  obtained  for  the  New  Eng 
land  Emigrant  Aid  Company  in  the  next  winter. 
That  company  still  exists.  Before  May,  1855, 
thirty  thousand  dollars  were  subscribed  and 
spent.  Eventually,  the  company  raised  and 
spent  one  hundred  and  thirty-six  thousand  dol- 


THE    NEBRASKA   BILL  155 

lars.  The  first  company  of  emigrants  went 
under  the  direction  of  its  executive  in  August 
of  1854.  Dr.  Charles  Robinson,  who  afterward 
became  Governor  of  Kansas,  was  the  leader. 

When  this  New  England  Emigrant  Aid  Com 
pany  organized,  the  largest  subscriber  was  John 
Carter  Brown,  a  milliormaire  merchant  of  Provi 
dence.  He  was  chosen  the  first  President  of  the 
new  organization. 

Mr.  Eli  Thayer  was  a  near  neighbor  of  mine 
in  Worcester,  and  as  soon  as  I  knew  of  his 
prompt  and  wise  movement  I  went  over  to  see 
him,  showed  him  my  Texas  pamphlet,  and  told 
him  I  was  ready  to  take  hold  anywhere.  He 
was  very  glad  to  have  a  man  Friday  so  near  at 
hand.  There  was  enough  for  all  of  us  to  do. 
We  called  meetings  in  all  available  places,  and 
went  to  speak  or  sent  speakers  wherever  we 
were  called  for.  Colonies  formed  themselves  in  all 
the  larger  towns  of  New  England,  and  before 
the  end  of  1855  we  had  sent  out  four  or  five 
thousand  settlers  into  Kansas.  It  is  fair  to  say 
that  every  man  in  this  company  went  for  the 
purpose  of  making  Kansas  a  free  State  and  to 
give  a  like  privilege  to  all  other  States.  No 
man  went  with  the  primary  purpose  of  enrich 
ing  himself  or  his  family.  What  followed  was 


156        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

that  Kansas  has  always  been  a  State  of  idealists. 
When  the  Civil  War,  so  called,  came  for  the 
whole  Nation,  Kansas,  which  had  tasted  war  for 
six  years  already,  furnished  a  larger  proportion 
of  soldiers  to  the  Union  army  than  any  other 
State  did. 

The  books  of  the  Emigrant  Aid  Companies 
show  that  the  Central  Company  spent  in  the 
year  1854  $23,623.73.  Before  the  spring  of 
the  next  year  the  expenditure  had  been  $96,- 
956.01.  In  1862  the  company  sold  all  its 
property  in  Kansas.  It  had  then  raised  and 
expended  $136,000.  It  retained  its  claim  on 
the  General  Government  for  destroying  by  mili 
tary  force  the  hotel  at  Lawrence.  For  this 
investment  no  subscriber  ever  received  any  re 
turn  except  in  the  success  of  the  enterprise  in 
its  great  object,  the  freedom  of  that  western 
empire. 

Local  societies  were  formed  in  various  sec 
tions —  working  in  their  own  fashion.  Mr. 
Thayer  arranged  for  a  meeting  in  the  city  of 
New  York  among  other  places.  It  was  not  large, 
but  it  was  enthusiastic.  Among  other  people 
present  was  the  late  William  Maxwell  Evarts, 
afterward  Secretary  of  State,  then  a  lawyer  of 
good  prospects  in  the  city,  but  not  so  well  known 


THE   NEBRASKA   BILL  157 

as  afterward.  Mr.  Evarts  made  a  speech  in 
which  he  said  that  he  supposed  he  was  worth 
four  thousand  dollars,  and  he  subscribed  one 
thousand  of  it  to  the  new  enterprise. 

Most  fortunately  for  the  country  the  Southern 
oligarchy  and  their  coadjutors  in  Missouri  took 
the  alarm  more  seriously  than  they  needed  to 
have  done.  Mr.  Thayer  had  boldly  named  five 
million  dollars  as  the  capital  for  his  new  com 
pany.  While  we  were  doing  our  best  to  bring 
together  the  twenty  thousand  dollars  which  we 
spent  in  1854,  every  paper  in  Missouri  and 
farther  South  was  announcing  that  we  had  five 
millions  at  our  command.  This  announcement 
answered  our  purpose  almost  as  well  as  if  it  had 
been  true.  And  I  think  that  no  single  cause 
stimulated  the  Western  emigration  into  Kansas 
more  than  the  announcement  and  belief  that 
rich  New  England  capitalists  were  investing  five 
million  dollars  there. 

The  plan  of  Mr.  Thayer  was  very  simple,  and 
it  is  really  a  pity  that  it  has  not  been  carried 
out,  even  in  some  of  its  details,  to  the  present 
day.  I  am  fond  of  saying,  and  I  believe,  that  it 
was  the  beginning  of  "  personally  conducted " 
parties,  such  as  the  Cooks  take  over  the  world 
to-day.  We  would  announce  at  our  office  that, 


158        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

say,  on  the  3d  of  August  we  should  send  a 
company  to  Kansas.  We  corresponded  with  the 
railway  companies  to  know  which  would  give  us 
the  cheapest  terms.  We  peddled  through  tickets 
to  the  people  who  came  to  us  at  the  wholesale 
price.  Then  we  appointed  a  competent  person 
to  take  charge  of  the  party.  In  this  way  men 
who  went  forward  with  the  first  parties  could 
send  their  women  or  even  their  little  children 
in  subsequent  parties,  without  coming  back  to 
take  them  over  the  route.  It  was  one  of  the 
jokes  of  the  time  that  when  one  of  Frank 
Pierce' s  pro-slavery  Governors  was  sent  out  he 
and  his  secretaries  bought  their  tickets  of  one 
of  our  agents,  so  that  we  "  personally  conducted  " 
them.  If  this  were  true,  and  I  think  it  was, 
we  had  no  right  to  complain. 

We  never  gave  a  penny  to  a  settler  unless  he 
was  engaged  to  do  work  for  us.  And  the 
people  who  said  that  we  took  out  paupers  did 
not  know  how  many  substantial  men  and  women 
were  eager  to  go  into  Kansas. 

We  offered  a  prize  for  the  best  marching  song 
for  emigrants.  Miss  Larcom  won  the  prize,  and 
there  is  a  pretty  story  about  a  body  of  her 
young  friends  who  found  out  that  she  had  won 
it  before  she  knew  it  herself,  and  sang  it  under 


THE   NEBRASKA   BILL  159 

her  window  in  the  morning.  Whittier  wrote 
for  us  a  capital  marching  song  or  "  song  of 
degrees  "  :  — 

"  We  cross  the  prairie,  as  of  old 
Our  fathers  crossed  the  sea, 
To  make  the  West,  as  they  the  East, 
The  homestead  of  the  free." 

When  one  of  these  companies  came  to  the 
new  territory,  our  business  with  the  indi 
viduals  of  whom  it  was  composed  was  at  an 
end.  But,  naturally,  people  who  had  started 
out  together  liked  to  keep  together,  and  such 
people  would  take  up  their  lands  together  under 
the  Homestead  Act. 

Wherever  agents  could,  they  established  a 
steam  engine  for  cutting  lumber.  In  Lawrence 
we  assisted  Dr.  George  N.  Brown,  who  established 
a  printing-press  at  which  the  Herald  of  Freedom 
was  printed.  Eventually,  we  established  presses 
in  some  other  towns.  I  remember  that  the  hand 
bills  which  we  circulated  for  calling  meetings, 
at  some  of  which  I  spoke,  were  headed  "  Saw 
mills  and  Liberty."  The  theory  which  we  were 
impressing  was  that  towns  were  the  bulwarks 
of  freedom  ;  that  if  people  would  help  the  set 
tlers  by  establishing  their  sawmills,  they  would 
form  so  many  central  points  where  freedom 


160        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

would   gather;    and   all   this   proved    precisely 
true. 

The  movement  became  so  extensive  that  in 
the  United  States  Senate  a  careful  report  was 
made  vilifying  it  in  the  worst  style  of  the  arro 
gance  of  the  Southern  leaders  of  that  day.  In 
an  immense  collection  of  letters  at  that  time, 
I  find  two  or  three  from  Charles  Sunmer  which 
are  worth  printing :  — 

"WASHINGTON,  1st  March,  '56. 

"Mr  DEAR  HALE:  I  wish  I  could  have  the 
advantage  of  direct  conversation  with  you  for 
a  brief  hour  on  Kansas. 

66  It  is  clear  that  this  Congress  will  do  nothing 
for  the  benefit  of  Kansas.  In  the  House  we 
are  weak ;  in  the  Senate  powerless.  This 
Know-Nothing  shadow  has  demoralized  North 
ern  Representatives.  In  the  Senate,  the  small 
squad  of  Republicans  constitute  the  only  reliable 
friends.  Nothing  can  be  expected  from  Cass  or 
Douglas.  The  latter  in  executive  session  on 
Sherman's  case  expressed  great  indignation  with 
him  for  condescending  to  make  a  treaty  with 
rebels  at  Lawrence. 

"  To  what  point,  then,  should  we  address  our 
selves  ?  The  first  question  will  be  on  Reeder's 


THE   NEBRASKA   BILL 


161 


case.  This  belongs  exclusively  to  the  House, 
but  the  facts  evolved  there  will  throw  light  on 
the  whole  subject. 

"  Then  comes  the  application  for  admission  into 


From  an  engraving  by  Augustus  Robin. 

the  Union.  Here  is  a  difficulty  arising  (1)  from 
the  small  population  at  the  time  the  Constitu 
tion  was  adopted,  and  (2)  from  the  slender  sup- 


VOL.  II. M 


162        MEMOKIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

port  it  received  at  the  polls,  owing  doubtless  to 
the  invasion  then  proceeding. 

"  How  shall  these  matters  be  dealt  with  ? 
Pray  let  me  have  your  counsels. 

"  Of  course  the  pretended  Legislature  and  its 
acts  must  be  exposed  as  invalid.  But  what 
next  ?  Clearly,  there  must  be  a  Government 
there ;  and  the  promptest  way  of  getting  it  is 
by  the  recognition  of  the  new  Constitution. 
But  this  will  be  exposed  as  lacking  what  will 
be  called  entirety. 

"  I  know  your  interest  in  the  question,  and 
therefore  make  no  apology  for  this  hasty 

note. 

"  Ever  sincerely  yours, 

"CHARLES  SUMNER." 

"SENATE  CHAMBER,  13th  March,  '56. 

"  MY  DEAR  HALE  :  .  .  .  You  will  read  Douglas's 
elaborate  assault  on  the  Emigrant  Aid  Company. 
Allow  me  suggest  to  you  to  have  the  Company 
present  a  memorial  to  the  Senate  directly,  re 
sponsive  to  this  assault,  point  by  point,  and 
vindicating  its  simple  rights.  On  this  head  I 
need  not  give  you  any  hints. 

"  The  memorial  should  be  as  short  as  is  con 
sistent  with  a  complete  statement  of  the  case ; 


THE    NEBRASKA   BILL  163 

but  it  should  be  a  document  that  will  make 
the  position  of  the  Company  understood  by  the 
country. 

"  The  whole  atrocity  in  Kansas  is  now  vindi 
cated  as  a  National  counter-movement  to  the 
Emigrant  Aid  Company,  and  your  Company  is 
gibbeted  before  the  country  as  a  criminal. 

"  I  venture  to  suggest  that  this  be  attended  to 
at  once.     But  I  leave  it  all  to  your  discretion. 
"  Ever  faithfully  yours, 

"CHARLES  SUMNER." 

"  P.S.  —  To  me  this  assault  is  quite  natural, 
for  I  have  long  known  that  the  Slave  Power 
sticks  at  nothing !  " 

"SENATE  CHAMBER,  Monday. 

"  DEAR  HALE  :  If  you  send  a  memorial,  let  it 
be  addressed  to  the  Senate  and  House,  and  sent 
on  in  duplicate,  one  copy  for  the  Seriate,  and  the 
other  for  the  House. 

"  I  write  you  because  I  know  you. 
"  Ever  yours, 

"CHARLES  SUMNER." 

The  last  of  these  letters  was  written  three 
days  before  Brooks  struck  Sumner  on  the  head 
in  the  Senate  Chamber  and  silenced  his  voice  for 
the  years  which  followed.  On  Wednesday  of 


164        MEMORIES    OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

the  same  week,  the  day  before  the  Brooks  assault, 
a  force  from  Missouri,  under  the  direction  of 
the  United  States  Marshal,  burned  our  hotel 
and  Governor  Robinson's  house,  destroyed  Dr. 
Brown's  printing-press,  and  plundered  several 
storehouses.  Our  settlers,  as  law-abiding  citizens, 
would  not  oppose  the  United  States  authority. 

To  me  personally  it  is  an  interesting  memorial 
of  the  time  that  the  next  week  we  held  a  public 
meeting  in  Faneuil  Hall  in  Boston,  to  pass  judg 
ment  on  the  two  atrocities  which  happened  so 
close  to  each  other,  that  of  the  23d  of  May  and 
that  of  the  24th.  On  that  occasion,  on  the  plat 
form  of  Faneuil  Hall,  I  introduced  my  father, 
who  had  been  then  for  forty  years  the  editor  of 
the  Daily  Advertiser,  the  leading  Whig  paper, 
to  Henry  Wilson,  the  United  States  Senator,  who 
had  taken  the  place  of  Edward  Everett  in  the 
United  States  Senate.  Here  were  two  men,  now 
wholly  at  one  in  the  handling  of  the  slavery 
question,  who  had  never  spoken  to  each  other 
until  on  that  platform  they  met  together.  The 
incident  was  a  good  illustration  of  the  way  in 
which  the  Nebraska  Bill  had  closed  up  the  ranks 
in  the  Northern  opposition  to  slavery.  For 
the  Advertiser  and  my  father  represented  the 
friends  of  Mr.  Webster,  and  had  loyally  sup- 


THE   NEBRASKA   BILL  165 

ported  him,  on  the  ground  of  their  readiness  to 
give  and  take  what  had  been  promised  in  the 
Missouri  Compromise.  Now  they  were  set  free. 
I  had  meant  and  wished  to  print  here  some  of 
the  curious  details  of  the  Kansas  Settlement  for 
which  the  materials  are  at  my  hand.  I  am  now 
the  President  of  the  Emigrant  Aid  Company. 
But  space  is  space  and  a  page  is  a  page,  so  that 
I  must  reserve  them  for  some  other  place  and 
time.  The  first  election  in  the  Territory  showed 
that  armed  men  from  Missouri  meant  to  take  its 
organization  into  their  hands.  The  settlers  had 
to  arm  themselves ;  and  at  their  request  our 
officers  made  the  purchase  of  Sharp's  rifles,  which 
won  a  place  in  history.  At  one  time  Henry 
Ward  Beecher  was  nicknamed  Sharp's  Rifle 
Beecher,  because  he  had  contributed  to  the  Rifle 
Fund.  Here  is  a  letter  which  marks  the  date  in 

history  :  — 

"  SHARP'S  RIFLE  MANUFACTURING  Co., 
"  HARTFORD,  May  7,  1855. 

"  TJiomas  H.  Webb,  Esq.,  Secretary  of 

New  England  Emigrant  Aid  Company. 

"  DEAR  SIR  :  Annexed  find  invoice  of  one 
hundred  carbines,  ammunition,  etc.,  ordered  Mr. 
Deitzler,  this  morning.  For  balance  of  account, 
I  have  ordered  on  Messrs.  Lee,  Higginson  &  Co., 


166        MEMORIES   OF   A  HUNDRED   YEARS 

thirty  days  from  this  date,  $2,155.65,  as  directed 

by  you.  .  .  . 

"  Your  obedient  servant, 

"  J.  C.  PALMER, 

"  President:' 

I  have  severely  compressed  the  history,  for 
twelve  years,  of  the  New  England  Emigrant  Aid 
Company,  in  Kansas.  I  can  wish  now  that  that 
history  might  be  written  out  more  at  length. 
But  I  cannot  do  it  here. 

I  ought,  I  believe,  to  call  attention  here  to  the 
absurd  desire  of  some  people  in  Kansas  and  out 
of  it  to  keep  out  from  history  the  names  of  some 
of  the  earlier  leaders;  true  men  who  did  things 
for  which  they  ought  to  be  honored.  In  myself, 
I  think  that  the  erratic  enterprise  of  John 
Brown,  a  man  for  whom  I  have  very  high  respect, 
was  of  great  injury  to  the  infant  state.  But  in 
the  wish  to  make  him  a  hero,  it  has  seemed 
desirable  to  crowd  out  of  sight  men  who  were 
in  Kansas  long  before  him.  For  a  single  in 
stance,  Governor  Charles  Robinson,  the  first  Gov 
ernor  of  Kansas  chosen  by  the  people,  had  been 
in  the  valley  of  the  Kansas  River  as  early  as  the 
summer  of  1854,  as  an  agent  of  the  Emigrant  Aid 
Company.  Long  before  that  time,  he  had  crossed 
Kansas,  with  an  overland  party,  to  California. 


THE   NEBRASKA   BILL  167 

For  the  critical  years  following  August,  1854, 
when  it  was  necessary  to  show  that  the  settlers 
from  the  North  and  Northwest  were  acting  under 
United  States  law,  Robinson  showed  the  most  ex 
traordinary  courage  and  wisdom.  Step  by  step, 
under  his  lead,  the  real  colonists  won  victory 
after  victory  over  poor  Franklin  Pierce  and 
James  Buchanan ;  and  they  showed  to  all  men 
that  they  were  on  the  side  of  law  and  order.  It 
is  absurd,  not  to  say  wicked,  to  try  to  leave  such 
a  man  out  of  history.  The  first  agents  of  the 
Emigrant  Aid  Company  were  Charles  Robinson, 
Samuel  C.  Pomeroy,  and  Charles  Branscomb. 
I  do  not  know,  and  nobody  else  knows,  where 
Kansas  would  be  to-day  without  them,  and 
without  Eli  Thayer,  who  sent  them.  Robinson 
was  a  settler  in  Kansas  more  than  a  year  before 
John  Brown. 


THE   WAR 


CHAPTER  V 

THE   WAR 
ONE   TO   MAKE   BEADY 

THERE  has  been  a  great  temptation  to  pre 
pare  for  this  part  of  these  memoirs  a 
severely  condensed  history  of  the  Civil  War. 
For  eighteen  months  I  had  such  a  plan  in  mind, 
and  it  was  with  regret  that  I  abandoned  it. 
But  I  have  abandoned  it.  I  should  like  to  write 
such  a  history.  I  think  if  I  had  ten  years  of 
life  before  me,  with  nothing  else  to  do,  I  would 
do  it.  But  I  will  not  do  it  here. 

No !  The  reader  ought  to  understand,  by 
this  time,  that  he  is  looking  at  the  century 
through  my  key-hole.  We  are  taking  snap-shots 
together,  and  of  our  snap-shot  pictures  I  throw 
away  nineteen  before  I  let  the  reader  see  one. 

I  think  there  will  be  a  certain  interest  in  bring 
ing  together  five  or  six  separate  glimpses  of  the 
war,  which  will  show  how  a  working  minister 
in  a  Northern  parish  could  be  mixed  up  in  it. 
I  have  had  in  mind,  for  nearly  forty  years,  the 

171 


172        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

bringing  together  of  a  set  of  papers  in  church 
history  and  printing  them  in  a  book  which 
should  be  called  "  A  Church  in  the  War."  But  we 
cannot  print  that  book  here  at  the  end  of  a  vol 
ume.  Here  are, 
however,  a  few 
personal  memo 
randa,  most  of 
which  date  from 
the  time,  which 
will  serve  in 
their  way  as 
so  many  fore 
ground  lights  for 
its  history. 

Whoever  writes 
the  history  of 
the  nineteenth 
century  ought  to 
remember  that 
after  all  the  irri 
tation  and  even 
savage  rage  of  section  against  section  the  war 
took  the  North  by  surprise.  For  myself,  I 
regarded  the  Southern  declarations  as  part  of 
a  game  of  brag,  even  up  to  the  first  shot  on 
Sumter.  I  remember  that  a  week  or  two  before 


ONE   TO   MAKE    READY  173 

that  happened,  as  I  came  out  of  church  on 
what  must  have  been  the  first  Sunday  in  April, 
Wendell  Phillips  was  passing  the  gateway  of 
the  little  courtyard.  I  joined  him  and  walked 
with  him,  and  he  told  me  that  the  Carolinians 
were  throwing  up  batteries  from  which  to 
fire  on  Fort  Sumter.  I  knew  the  ground  and 
water,  or  thought  I  did,  and  I  pooh-poohed,  and 
said,  "  Batteries  ?  What  are  they  making  them 
of  —  the  waves  of  the  sea  ?  "  and  intimated  that 
all  this  was  the  exuberance  of  a  pretence  which 
would  cool  down  into  nothing.  Phillips  said, 
"  I  hope  so."  But  within  a  fortnight's  time  his 
hopes  and  my  expectations  were  disappointed. 
Yet  I  was  myself  at  that  same  time  drilling  as 
an  active  member  of  Salignac's  Rifle  Corps.  My 
connection  with  this  drill  club  began  one  evening 
at  a  meeting  of  a  college  club  which  had  existed 
twenty  years.  Edward  Cabot,  the  distinguished 
architect,  who  was  one  of  the  members,  told  us 
that  he  and  some  other  young  gentlemen  had 
formed  a  drill  club  for  the  training  for  war.  In 
my  own  memory  this  marks  the  moment  when 
anybody  thought  that  war  was  impending.  For 
rne,  as  I  say,  I  thought  the  bluster  of  the  South 
ern  States  was  the  bragging  of  people  used  to 
playing  cards,  and  I  did  not  believe  that  things 


174         MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

would  come  to  that  crisis.  But  all  the  same  I 
wanted  "  to  encourage  the  rest,"  as  Voltaire  said. 
I  was  minister  of  a  large  parish,  and  I  wanted 
the  young  men  of  that  parish  to  do  their  duty. 
I  told  Cabot  that  he  might  count  me  as  a  mem 
ber.  I  think  it  was  the  next  day  I  went  down 
to  join,  and  from  that  time  until  the  war  was 
well  advanced  I  went  down  to  drill  daily. 
Salignac  had  been  an  officer  in  the  French  ser 
vice  and  was  quite  master  of  all  that  we  needed 
to  learn  from  him.  Amos  Adams  Lawrence,  the 
same  with  whom  I  had  worked  in  the  coloniza 
tion  of  Kansas,  and  who  gave  his  name  to  the 
city  of  Lawrence  there,  was  very  much  interested 
in  the  club.  He  obtained  for  us  the  use  of  a 
large  hall  owned  by  Mr.  Gray,  the  hall  which  Mr. 
Shuman  now  occupies  at  the  corner  of  Summer 
Street  and  Washington  Street.  There  we  drilled 
all  winter. 

I  was,  therefore,  well  up  in  regimental  tactics 
and  well  enough  up  in  the  drilling  of  soldiers, 
when  on  the  fatal  Sunday  morning  of  April, 
1861,  it  was  announced  that  Sumter  had  been 
fired  on.  Every  young  man  who  was  worth  his 
salt  then  wanted  to  fall  into  the  ranks,  and  at 
Salignac' s  we  had  our  hands  full  in  drilling  new 
recruits.  I  suppose  I  was  a  sergeant.  Here  is 


ONE   TO   MAKE   READY  175 

a  reminiscence  of  one  of  those  April  days :  How 
often  have  I  preached  in  Chicago  and  General 
Bayley  has  met  me  on  the  pulpit  stairs  and  said, 
"  Can  you  see  both  screws  of  the  musket,  Dr. 
Hale  ?  "  He  was  a  youngster  in  my  own  Sun 
day-school  who  had  fallen  in  with  the  rest. 
Passing  behind  the  rank,  in  my  duty  as  instructor, 
I  had  said  to  him,  "  Throw  up  your  gun  a  little ; 
I  want  to  see  both  those  screws."  From  such  a 
beginning  Bayley  came  out  a  Major-General  in 
1865. 

The  hall  in  Summer  Street  was  not  large 
enough  for  us  to  parade  or  drill  in  a  straight 
line.  It  was  bent  as  the  letter  E  is  bent,  with 
out  the  cross  mark  in  the  middle.  I  was  one  of 
the  taller  men,  my  friend  Dr.  Williams  being 
taller  than  I.  So  we  were  at  the  extreme  right 
of  the  battalion  line,  and  when  we  presented 
arms  we  were  opposite  the  extreme  left  of  the 
line,  which  was  made  up  of  the  men  who  were 
not  so  tall.  So  it  was  that,  week  in  and  week 
out,  I  presented  arms  at  any  dress  parade  to  a 
fair-haired  Saxon  boy,  a  hundred  feet  away, 
whose  name  I  did  not  know.  And  it  was  not 
until  I  assisted  at  his  funeral  that  I  learned  that 
this  charming,  manly  face  which  I  had  seen  so 
often  was  that  of  young  Will  Putnam,  Lowell's 


176        MEMORIES    OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

nephew,  who  had  been  killed  at  Ball's  Bluff.  In 
fact,  nineteen-twentieths  of  Salignac's  Drill  Corps 
took  commissions  in  the  Massachusetts  regiments 
and  went  to  war.  To  this  day  I  cannot  pass 
through  the  central  memorial  hall  of  Sanders 
at  Cambridge  without  tears,  there  are  so  many 
of  my  college  companions  and  of  my  other  young 
friends  whose  names  are  engraved  on  the  tablets 
there. 

After  the  announcement  that  Sumter  was 
fired  on,  it  would  be  fair  to  say  that  nobody  in 
Boston  thought  of  anything  but  the  war  for 
four  years.  Everything  turned  on  that  pivot. 
In  that  first  week,  if  a  man  asked  another  man 
if  he  could  sell  him  a  horse,  the  answer  was, 
"  You  are  going  to  the  front  ?  The  horse  is 
yours."  The  Street  Railway  Company  placed 
all  their  horses  at  the  disposal  of  the  Governor. 
The  Massachusetts  Fifth  was  sent  to  Fort  Mon 
roe  directly  under  the  advice  of  John  Murray 
Forbes.  Some  one  asked  what  were  the  arrange 
ments  for  provisioning  the  steamer  which  took 
them  from  Providence,  and  Forbes  said,  "  I  have 
provisioned  her  myself." 

My  brother  Charles,  who  was  at  that  time 
Speaker  of  the  House  of  Representatives,  sent 
me  a  note  one  morning  which  showed  me  that 


ONE   TO   MAKE   READY  177 

he  was  too  sick  to  be  anywhere  but  in  bed.  I 
went  over  with  a  carriage  to  his  bachelor  quar 
ters  to  bring  him  to  my  own  house.  The  poor 
fellow  said  that  he  had  in  his  hands  some 
arrangements  for  vaccine  which  were  to  be  sent 
to  such  and  such  regiments  at  the  South.  I 
told  him  that  I  would  see  to  the  vaccine,  and 
went  to  the  State  House  for  that  purpose. 
There  was  Henry  Lee,  well  known  to  all  Har 
vard  men  as  the  chief  marshal,  for  many  years, 
of  their  processions.  He  was  an  officer  in  Salig- 
nac's  Drill  Corps,  and  at  that  moment  was  act 
ing  as  a  volunteer  military  aid  to  Governor 
Andrew.  While  I  waited  for  a  letter  I  needed, 
Lee  asked  me  if  I  could  not  go  down  to  Fall 
River  that  afternoon  and  drill  the  Fall  River 
companies.  I  was  most  eager  to  go?  but  I  had 
in  hand  these  vaccine  arrangements,  and  many 
other  duties  of  the.  same  sort,  and  I  made  the 
"  great  refusal."  Which  story  I  tell  because  I 
think  if  I  had  gone  down  to  Fall  River  and  had 
my  experience  of  a  drill-master's  life,  I  should 
probably  have  stayed  with  the  army  until  the 
war  was  over.  Who  knows  but  these  might  be 
the  memoirs  of  a  major-general,  as  Bayley's 
would  be  ? 

But  I  laid  down  the  rule  for  myself  that  I 


VOL.   II.  N 


178        MEMORIES   OF  A  HUNDRED   YEARS 

would  not  go  in  person  to  the  war  until  I  found 
nothing  to  do  every  day  at  home. 

When  all  was  over,  on  the  22d  day  of  Decem 
ber,  1865,  Governor  Andrew  had  ordered  a  pa 
rade  of  representatives  of  each  of  the  sixty-six 
Massachusetts  regiments,  who  were  to  march  to 
the  State  House  and  leave  their  smoked  and 
ragged  colors  there.  I  noticed  in  the  morning 
paper  that  they  would  pass  our  church.  I  sent 
a  note  to  the  chairman  of  the  right  committee, 
and  the  women  opened  the  church ;  they  lighted 
their  fire,  and  when,  that  morning,  one  or  two 
thousand  men  marched  through  Union  Park,  hot 
coffee  stood  in  full  pails  on  the  steps,  with 
enough  for  every  man  of  the  command,  and 
they  broke  ranks  and  drank.  In  our  little 
museum  at  church  we  show  receipts  of  the 
State  of  Massachusetts  for  the  flannel  under 
clothes  we  sent  them  in  April,  1861. 

Of  other  personal  reminiscences,  the  papers 
which  make  up  this  chapter  are  all  that  I  may 
now  use.  The  first  is  a  letter  from  a  gentleman, 
in  an  important  official  position  in  Washington, 
describing  his  impressions  as  to  the  army,  as  he 
saw  it  in  August,  after  the  defeat  at  Manassas, 
or,  as  we  say,  Bull  Run.  Even  after  thirty 
years  it  seems  worth  while  to  show  out  of 


ONE   TO   MAKE   READY  179 

what  inexperience  Grant's  and  Meade's  armies 
began. 

"WASHINGTON,  August  6,  1861. 

"  MY  DEAR  SIR  :  I  have  received  your  note 
with  inclosure,  of  2d  inst.,  and  am  sorry  we  are 
not  to  be  more  closely  associated.  However, 
there  is  much  to  do  everywhere  now,  and  what 
is  most  important  is  no  longer  in  Washington. 
Yet  one  needs  to  be  at  Washington  to  see  into 
what  a  terrible  rut  of  inefficiency  and  humbug 
and  twaddle  our  poor  Nation  has  got.  There 
seems  no  end  to  buncombe  ;  we  are  saturated 
with  it  high  and  low. 

"  Now  what  is  the  fact  about  this  noble,  etc., 
gallant,  patriotic  army  ?  It  was,  in  large  part, 
a  miserable  rabble  of  sentimental  actors  and 
'  foreign  mercenaries.'  It  had  no  real  discipline, 
only  a  play  of  it,  or  so  much  of  it  as  was  pretty. 
Its  officers  were  knaves  and  fools.  They  had 
never  read  history,  they  knew  not  the  simplest 
elementary  conditions  of  war,  and  they  never 
really  expected  to  fight,  certainly  not  to  conduct 
fighting.  The  consequences  of  the  Bull's  Run l 
affair  prove  this  if  they  prove  anything.  The 
exceptions  count  by  thousands,  it  is  true,  but  the 

1  This  was  this  gentleman's  spelling.  Bull  Run  is  said  to  be 
correct. 


180        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

central  fact  is  that  the  army  was  good  for  noth 
ing.  I  really  believe  that  three  regiments  of 
regulars  well  commanded  could  take  the  capital 
to-day,  if  there  were  no  regulars  in  it.  And 
how  does  the  country  behave  ?  The  cruel,  sav 
age,  senseless  poltroons  who  took  to  the  ambu 
lances  and  ran  over  the  wounded  and  left  them 
to  die  of  thirst,  taking  their  water  for  themselves 
—  the  surgeons  themselves  who  went  mad  with 
fright  —  have  you  hung  any  of  them  in  Boston  ? 
They  haven't  been  named  yet ;  nobody  has  tried 
to  get  their  names.  But  the  vermin  of  various 
varieties  send  their  names  to  a  New  York  news 
paper  to  testify  that  they  deserted  in  spite  of 
the  earnest  request  of  their  officers  on  the  eve  of 
the  first  engagement,  after  having  played  soldier 
at  the  public  expense  three  months,  because 
<  their  time  was  out '  and  they  '  wanted  to  see 
their  families ' !  God  save  their  children  from 
living.  And  the  people  of  New  York  let  these 
fellows  ( return  to  their  business.'  Does  the  his 
tory  of  the  world  exhibit  traces  of  the  existence 
of  anything  meaner  than  that  ?  And  the  men 
who  did  behave  well  —  can  you  name  them  ? 
Who  cares  for  them  ?  They  are  lost  in  our  habit 
of  buncombe. 

"  We  must  strain  every  nerve  to  put  things  on 


ONE   TO   MAKE   READY  181 

an  entirely  different  footing  or  we  are  lost.  The 
very  idea  of  order,  precision,  punctuality,  com 
plete  honesty,  and  exact  responsibility  is  gener 
ally  lost  among  us.  A  man  does  the  meanest 
things  and  does  not  know  it ;  the  most  gallant 
things,  and  unless  the  spread-eagle  takes  them 
up  nobody  else  knows  it. 

"  The  women  terribly  want  something  to  do. 
Couldn't  they  be  got  to  form  committees  to  hunt 
deserters  and  cowards,  knavish  contractors  and 
speculating  legislators,  officers  who  give  no  care 
to  their  men  except  for  parade  and  who  throw 
away  their  coats  in  battle  lest  they  should  be 
known  for  officers,  soldiers  who  can't  be  got  to 
brush  their  coats  or  wash  their  faces  or  take  care 
of  a  sick  comrade  or  look  twice  at  an  enemy  ? 

"  Until  in  some  way  or  other  something  allied 
to  discipline  can  be  forced  upon  these  creatures 
sent  here  for  soldiers,  all  sanitary  preaching  is 
about  useless.  There  ought  to  be  a  few  hundred 
men  hung  here  to-morrow.  Then  we  might  ask 
commanding  officers  to  give  orders  for  the 
health  of  their  men.  But  orders  go  for  nothing 
now.  They  are  almost  of  as  little  value  as 
promises. 

"  Now  I've  told  you  the  whole  story.  The 
Sanitary  Commission  can  do  nothing  but  poke 


182         MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

sticks  in  at  the  edges.  The  whole  kettle  needs 
to  be  upset,  and  you  are  nearer  the  long  end 
of  the  lever  in  Boston  than  you  would  be  here. 

"  As  to  the  matter  of  Mr.  Bishop's  concern,  I 
have  thought  much  about  it,  and  talked  a  good 
deal  and  done  a  little.  The  small  Treasury 
notes  are  chiefly  for  the  convenience  of  sol 
diers  wishing  to  send  to  their  families.  I 
don't  think  Mr.  Bishop's  plan  would  accom 
plish  much  for  its  cost.  The  best  that  I  can 
think  of  would  be  some  sort  of  soldiers'  sav 
ings  bank,  with  agents  preceding  and  follow 
ing  close  upon  the  paymasters.  This  is  a 
matter  for  solid  men  and  financiers  to  think 
upon.  .  But  Dr.  Howe  has  returned  now,  and 
you  have  the  Brick  Lane  branch  in  full  swing. 
I  wish  that  you  would  have  it  talked  about, 
and  see  if  any  scheme  of  the  kind  will  bear 
beating  out  to  details."  * 

1  After  a  friend  of  mine,  an  old  soldier  who  knows  what  he  talks 
about,  had  read  the  letter  printed  above,  he  wrote  to  me  thus : 
"  It  would  be  a  mistake  to  give  permanent  prominence  to 
this  letter.  He  ought  to  have  waited  three  years  before  he 
wrote  such  a  letter."  I  did  not  attach  the  writer's  name  to  the 
letter  for  reasons  which  my  old  friend  will  approve.  My  friend 
continues  in  these  words  :  — 

"  It  principally  shows  that  there  was  one  official  in  Washing 
ton  who  was  in  as  bad  a  panic  —  or  worse  —  as  the  army  at 
Manassas. 

"  Such  documents  are  now  chiefly  valuable  to  show  the  state 


ULYSSES  S.  GRANT. 


AS   THE   WAR   WENT   ON  185 

AS   THE  WAR   WENT   ON 

It  will  give  a  hint  of  the  variety  of  the 
work  of  a  church  at  home  when  I  say  that  we 
had  our  share,  through  the  Sanitary  Commis 
sion,  in  help  to  the  hospitals  of  the  army,  the 
relief  of  its  sick,  the  care  of  prisoners  and 
refugees,  and  the  education  of  freedmen.  The 
first  teachers  who  went  to  Port  Royal  to  teach 
blacks  were  my  assistant,  the  Rev.  Charles  E. 
Rich,  now  of  California,  and  one  of  our  Sunday- 
school  teachers,  Mr.  George  N.  Boynton.  Col 
onel  Everett  Peabody  commanded  the  regiment 
most  in  advance  at  Shiloh.  He  was  sure  that 
Grant's  army  would  be  attacked,  and  gave  in 
his  report  of  that  certainty.  His  men,  ready 
for  battle,  met  the  first  attack,  in  the  gray  of 
the  morning,  and  he  and  most  of  them  were 
killed  in  the  onset.  It  is  one  of  our  proud 
recollections  that  the  flannel  shirts  which  were 
dyed  again  that  day  were  made  in  our  vestry. 

Three  days   afterward   the   young    men  who 

of  mind  of  the  writer.  John  S.  Wise  is  right  —  The  Battle  of 
Bull  Run  was  a  Union  success  up  to  3  o'clock  in  the  afternoon. 
The  panic  was  most  amazing,  and  humanly  unaccountable. 
But  those  men  were  not  cowards  and  poltroons.  They  after 
ward  fought  like  heroes  on  many  a  bloody  field.  Pardon  me 
for  saying  that  I  think  the  name  of  the  writer  ought  to  have 
been  attached  to  this  letter." 


186        MEMORIES   OF   A  HUNDRED   YEARS 

first  appeared  at  the  landing  in  charge  of  the 
hospital  steamer  after  the  horrors  of  the  battle 
of  Shiloh  were  two  young  physicians  from  our 
church,  with  supplies  which  we  had  forwarded 
—  Dr.  John  Green,  now  of  St.  Louis,  and  Dr. 
Abram  Wilder  of  Kansas. 

The  editor  of  the  first  newspaper  published  in 
a  rebel  prison  was  one  of  our  boys,  who  had  vol 
unteered  the  first  day  and  had  been  taken  pris 
oner  at  Bull  Run.  He  is  a  neighbor  of  mine, 
Mr.  George  E.  Bates.  The  news  of  the  horrors  of 
the  second  Bull  Run  came  on  Sunday  morning. 
Ladies  did  not  go  home  from  the  church,  but 
stayed  in  the  vestries  to  tear  bandages,  to  pack 
boxes  and  see  them  forwarded  by  the  right  ex 
presses.  I  have  given  notice  from  the  pulpit 
that  hospital  attendants  were  needed  by  the 
Sanitary  Commission,  and  men  have  started  the 
same  evening  on  service  which  lasted  for  years. 
I  once  had  from  Richmond  a  private  intimation 
of  methods  by  which  Union  officers  could  be 
supplied  with  home  stores.  We  needed  a  hun 
dred  and  ten  private  letters  written  to  as  many 
Northern  homes ;  I  told  this  to  the  ladies  of  my 
class,  and  the  long  letters  were  written  and 
posted  before  night.  I  think  —  but  I  am  not 
certain  —  that  the  only  ether  and  chloroform 


AS   THE   WAR   WENT   ON  187 

which  carne  to  the  hospital  in  Richmond  where 
Union  officers  were  treated  in  the  spring  of  1864 
were  boxed  and  sent  from  our  church. 

For  all  this  time  the  system  was  going  for 
ward  by  which  we  forwarded  the  stores  to  hos 
pitals,  and  even  regiments,  which  exigencies 
outside  the  regulations  suddenly  required.  And 
when  you  go  beyond  what  was  physically  done 
within  the  walls  of  the  South  Congregational 
Church,  there  is  no  end  to  such  stories.  Men 
and  women  gave  money  like  water.  The  words 
"public  spirit,"  the  "public  breath,"  got  an  in 
terpretation  and  meaning  they  have  never  lost. 
God  grant  they  never  may ! 

I  have  an  old  box  of  sermons  labelled  "  War 
Sermons."  I  will  not  make  the  reader  study 
them.  I  could  not  if  I  would.  But  the  texts 
are  suggestive:  "Compel  them  to  come  in." 
"  A  little  leaven  leaveneth  the  whole  lump." 
"  Stand  fast  in  the  liberty  wherein  Christ  has 
made  us  free."  "  Let  not  him  that  girdeth  on 
his  harness  boast  himself  as  he  that  putteth  it 
off."  "The  unity  of  the  spirit."  "The  spirit 
indeed  is  willing,  but  the  flesh  is  weak."  "  Give 
to  him  that  asketh  of  thee,  and  from  him  that 
would  borrow  of  thee  turn  not  thou  away." 
(This  on  a  sermon  which  is  indorsed,  "  Take  the 


188        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

loan.")  "Lift  up  your  eyes  and  look  on  the 
fields.  They  are  white  already  to  harvest." 
On  a  sermon  indorsed  "  Buchanan's  Fast/' 
"Put  not  your  trust  in  princes."  As  early  as 
March  28,  1859,  " I  beheld  Satan  as  lightning 
fall  from  heaven."  "  Gather  up  the  fragments 
that  remain,  that  nothing  be  lost."  In  a  sermon 
marked  "  Reaction,"  "  The  same  is  he  that 
heareth  the  word  and  anon  with  joy  receive th 
it,  yet  hath  not  root  in  himself  but  dureth  for 
a  while."  "  His  mercy  en  dureth  forever."  On 
the  President's  Fast,  April  30,  1863,  "Seeing 
that  we  are  compassed  about  with  so  great  a 
cloud  of  witnesses."  "  That  they  all  may  be 
one."  "  What  God  hath  joined  together,  let  no 
man  put  asunder."  "  Forgetting  those  things 
that  are  behind,  and  reaching  forward  to  those 
that  are  before."  "And  the  children  of  Israel 
went  up  and  wept  before  the  Lord  until  even 
and  asked  counsel  of  the  Lord,  saying,  Shall  I 
go  up  to  battle  against  the  children  of  Ben 
jamin,  my  brother  ?  And  the  Lord  said,  Go  up 
against  him."  "  Not  unto  us,  0  Lord,  but  unto 
thy  name  give  glory."  This  on  the  Thanksgiv 
ing  Day  after  the  return  of  peace. 

I  was    at   the  annual  commencement  of  the 
Andover  Theological  Seminary  in  August,  1861, 


AS   THE   WAR   WENT   ON  189 

just  after  our  defeat  at  the  first  Bull  Run. 
The  chaplain  of  the  day  prayed  that  McDowell 
might  be  forgiven  "  for  having  unnecessarily 
initiated  a  battle  on  the  Lord's  day."  My  kins 
man,  Professor  Stowe,  who  was  there,  told  this 
story  of  Longfellow,  his  classmate  in  college, 
whom  he  had  met  a  few  days  before  :  Longfellow 
had  stopped  him  in  the  street  and  asked  him 
how  things  were  going  on  at  Andover ;  and  said, 
"  If  New  Testament  will  not  do,  you  must  give 
them  Old." 

Sometimes  as  an  officer  of  the  Sanitary  Com 
mission,  sometimes  to  preach  to  my  old  parish  at 
Washington,  I  went  on  to  that  city.  I  dare  not 
say  how  often  as  the  four  years  went  by. 

Here  is  a  curious  memorandum  of  a  conversa 
tion  which  I  had  with  Charles  Sumner  about 
Lincoln's  Compensated  Emancipation  message :  — 

"April  26,  1862,  Washington. 

Nothing  shows  the  power  of  the  President 
more  at  the  present  moment  than  the  way  in 
which  every  person  you  meet  thinks  and  gives 
you  to  think  that  he  and  the  President  are  hand 
in  glove,  and,  indeed,  quite  agree. 

I  went  through  with  this  very  pleasantly 
with  Dr.  Bellows  on  Tuesday.  To-night  I  took 


190        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

tea  with  Judge  Thomas,  who  spoke  quite  freely 
of  his  intimacy  with  the  President,  and  after 
ward  meeting  George  Livermore  and  going 
with  him  to  call  on  Mr.  Sumner.  He  entertained 
us,  and  very  agreeably,  with  the  history  of  the 
President's  message  for  compensated  emancipa 
tion,  for  which  he  took  a  good  deal  of  credit 
to  himself,  and  which  he  told  me  in  much  these 
words :  — 

"  That  began  a  good  while  ago  —  as  long  ago 
as  the  extra  session.  But  to  speak  of  this  ses 
sion  only,  the  night  I  got  here,  Saturday  night 

—  Congress  meets  on  Monday  —  as  soon  as  I 
had  brushed  off  the  dust  of  travel,  I  went  down 
to  see  the  President.     I  talked  with  him  alone 
two  hours  about  the  principal  subjects  of  the 
message.      I   talked   to   him   about  the   Trent 
affair,    about    the    conduct    of    the    army    and 
General  McClellan,  and  about   slavery.     About 
them   all   we    agreed,"  or   agreed    very   nearly. 
For  about  the  Trent  affair  we  agreed  entirely 

—  that  nothing  should  be  said  about  it.     About 
the  army  we  agreed  entirely,  and  General  Mc 
Clellan,    and    about    slavery    we    agreed    too, 
though  some  people  would  not  believe   this  — 
the    Daily    Advertiser    would    not    believe   it, 
Mr.  Hale.      But  we  did  agree  so  precisely  as 


AS  THE  WAR  WENT  ON  191 

this  —  that  the  President  said  after  we  had 
spoken  of  the  subject  in  every  detail  —  these 
were  his  very  words,  '  Well,  Mr.  Sumner,  the 
only  difference  between  you  and  me  on  this 
subject  is  a  difference  of  a  month  or  six  weeks 
in  time.'  '  Mr.  President/  said  I,  'if  that  is 
the  only  difference  between  us,  I  will  not  say 
another  word  to  you  about  it  till  the  longest 
time  you  name  has  passed  by.'  Nor  should  I 
have  done  so,  but  about  a  fortnight  after, 
when  I  was  with  him,  he  introduced  the  sub 
ject  himself,  asked  my  opinion  on  some  details 
of  his  plan,  and  told  me  where  it  labored  in 
his  mind.  At  that  time  he  had  the  hope  that 
some  one  of  the  border  States,  Delaware,  per 
haps,  if  nothing  better  could  be  got,  might  be 
brought  to  make  a  proposition  which  could 
be  made  use  of  as  the  initiative  to  hitch  the 
whole  thing  to.  He  was  in  correspondence 
with  some  persons  at  a  distance  with  this  view, 
but  he  did  not  consult  a  person  in  Washington, 
excepting  Mr.  Chase  and  Mr.  Blair  and  myself. 
Seward  knew  nothing  about  it.  So  it  lagged 
along  till  the  Trent  matter  came  to  its  crisis. 
I  was  with  him  then,  again  and  again.  Lord 
Lyons  sent  in  Lord  Russell's  letter.  I  went 
over  with  the  President  that  whole  subject. 


192        MEMORIES   OF   A  HUNDRED   YEARS 

There  were  four  ways  of  meeting  it.  We  went 
over  each  of  the  four.  We  agreed  entirely  as 
to  the  course  to  be  adopted.  But  I  said  to  him 
then  as  I  left  him,  '  Now,  Mr.  President,  if  you 
had  done  your  duty  earlier  in  the  slavery  mat 
ter,  you  would  not  have  this  trouble  on  you. 
Now  you  have  no  friends,  or  the  country  has 
none,  because  it  has  no  policy  upon  slavey. 
The  country  has  no  friends  in  Europe,  excepting 
isolated  persons.  England  is  not  our  friend. 
France  is  not.  But  if  you  had  announced  your 
policy  about  slavery,  this  thing  could  and  would 
have  come  and  gone  and  would  have  given  you 
no  anxiety.'  The  Trent  message  was  settled 
at  1  o'clock  on  the  afternoon  of  the  26th  of 
December,  and  that  day,  or  perhaps  the  next 
day,  I  drove  him  up  to  it  again.  I  said  to 
him,  I  remember,  '  I  want  you  to  make  Con 
gress  a  New  Year's  present  of  your  plan.'  But 
he  had  some  reason  still  for  a  delay.  He  was 
in  correspondence  with  Kentucky ;  there  was  a 
Mr.  Speed  in  Kentucky  to  whom  he  was  writ 
ing  ;  he  read  me  one  of  his  letters  once ;  and  he 
thought  he  should  hear  from  there  how  people 
would  be  affected  by  such  a  plan.  Every  time 
I  saw  him,  however,  I  spoke  to  him  about  it, 
and  I  saw  him  every  two  or  three  days.  At 


AS   THE   WAR   WENT   ON  193 

one  time  I  thought  he  would  send  in  the  mes 
sage  on  New  Year's  Day — and  I  said  some 
thing  about  what  a  glorious  thing  it  would  be. 
But  he  stopped  me  in  a  moment.  (  Don't  say  a 
word  about  that/  said  he.  'I  know  very  well 
that  the  name  which  is  connected  with  this 
matter  will  never  be  forgotten.'  Well,  there 
was  one  delay  and  another,  but  I  always  spoke 
to  him,  till  one  day,  early  in  January,  he  said 
sadly  that  he  had  been  up  all  night  with  his 
sick  child.  And  I  was  very  much  touched,  and 
I  resolved  that  I  would  say  nothing  else  to  the 
President  about  this  or  any  other  business,  if  I 
could  help  it,  till  that  child  were  well,  or  were 
dead.  And  I  did  not.  It  was  a  long,  com 
plicated  illness.  It  lasted  four  weeks.  And 
the  President  attended  to  no  business  that  could 
be  avoided.  He  saw  no  one,  he  signed  no  com 
missions.  There  were  mountains  of  commissions 
from  the  State  and  Navy  and  War  departments 
waiting  for  his  signature.  Seward  presided  at 
the  Cabinet  meetings.  At  last,  after  it  was 
over  —  I  had  never  said  a  word  to  the  President 
again  about  it  —  one  morning  here,  before  I  had 
breakfasted,  before  I  was  up  indeed,  both  his 
secretaries  came  over  to  say  that  he  wanted  to 
see  me  as  soon  as  I  could  see  him.  I  dressed 

VOL.  II.  — O 


194        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED  YEARS 

at  once  and  went  over ;  and  he  said,  '  I  want  to 
read  you  my  message.  I  want  to  know  how 
you  like  it.  I  am  going  to  send  it  in  to 
day/  So  he  read  it  to  me,  from  his  own 
manuscript.  And  I  asked  him  to  let  me  read 
it  myself,  so  that  I  could  take  it  in  more  care 
fully.  Well,  when  I  began  there  were  some 
things  in  it,  you  know,  that  I  wanted  to  change 
—  now  that  word  abolishment,  that  I  did  not 
want,  but,  you  know,  I  said,  '  There  is  to  every 
man  an  idiosyncrasy,  and  this  is  so  clearly  an 
aboriginal,  autochthonous  style  of  its  own  that  I 
will  not  suggest  an  alteration/ ' 

"Lucky  you  didn't,"  said  E.  E.  H. ;  "you 
would  have  made  a  pretty  botch  of  it."  Mr. 
Sumner  laughed  and  said,  "  Yes,  I  am  afraid  so. 
There  was,  as  it  was  printed,  an  unfinished 
sentence.  That  was  a  mistake  in  copying;  it 
was  not  in  his  manuscript.  Of  course,  if  I  had 
observed  a  word  left  out,  or  any  such  thing,  I 
would  have  told  him.  Well,  there  was  one  sen 
tence  where  I  told  him  that  he  must  let  me  re 
cast  it.  I  took  my  pencil,  and  I  said,  '  Let  me 
write  it  thus.  I  don't  want  people  saying  you 
think  this  and  so.'  I  was  going  to  turn  the  sen 
tence  round,  you  know,  enough  to  emasculate  it. 
But  he  said,  '  I'll  drop  the  whole  sentence/  and 


AS   THE   WAR   WENT   ON  195 

took  his  pen  and  drew  it  through.  I  was  delighted 
and  so  was  Chase,  who  came  afterwards  to  thank 
me  for  making  him  leave  it  out.  I  asked  him 
how  the  Cabinet  took  it.  He  had  called  them 
together  the  night  before  to  hear  it.  I  do  not 
know  when  there  has  been  a  Cabinet  meeting  in 
the  evening.  The  Cabinet  generally  meets  Tues 
day  and  Friday  at  12  and  sits  until  2.  But  the 
President  had  sent  for  them  all  to  come  to  a 
Cabinet  meeting  in  the  evening.  '  Oh/  he  said, 
'they  all  liked  it.'  'Did  Seward  like  it?'  said  I. 
'  Oh,  yes,  he  liked  it.'  '  And  old  Bates,  did  he 
like  it  ? '  <  Oh,  he  liked  it  most  of  all.'  '  And 
Smith?'  'Smith,  he  liked  it  thoroughly.'  I 
did  not  ask  him  about  the  others,  because  of 
them,  of  course,  I  knew.  Well,  I  sat  with  it  in 
my  hands,  reading  it  over  and  not  bearing  to 
give  it  up,  but  he  said,  '  There,  now,  you've 
read  it  enough,  run  away.  I  must  send  it  in 
to-day.'  He  had  called  his  secretary  already, 
and  he  was  waiting.  I  gave  him  the  first  page, 
and  he  copied  it  while  I  was  reading  the  rest. 
I  rode  down  to  the  Senate,  and  then  I  went  to 
General  Lander's  funeral.  I  was  one  of  the  pall 
bearers.  I  met  the  President  there,  but  I  said 
nothing  about  this,  of  course.  I  rode  back  to 
the  Senate  and  found  them  in  executive  session. 


196         MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

I  went  to  the  desk  to  see  if  the  message  had 
been  sent  in,  and  there  it  was.  I  went  to  one 
Senator  and  another,  to  ask  them  if  they  knew 
what  the  President  had  sent  in.  Oh,  some  more 
nominations,  they  supposed.  But  I  sent  them 
to  the  desk  to  see,  and  so  one  Senator  and 
another  read  it  there. 

"  But  I  had  told  the  President  that  I  should 
say  nothing*  about  it.  It  should  be  his  act.  I 
might,  of  course,  have  made  a  speech.  I  might 
have  made  some  preparation  for  a  speech  of 
welcome  to  it.  But  I  would  not  do  this.  And 
I  said  nothing,  but  to  vote  as  every  one  else  did. 
Yet  I  had  been  the  only  Senator  consulted  from 
the  beginning  to  the  end." 

I  copy  the  whole  of  this  memorandum  of 
one  of  Mr.  Sumner's  conversations,  because  it 
shows,  in  a  way  which  is  now  as  pathetic 
as  it  is  amusing,  what  his  quite  unconscious 
habit  was  of  patronizing  the  people  with  whom 
he  had  to  do.  I  have  been,  told  that  he  was 
the  most  unpopular  man  who  was  ever  in  the 
United  States  Senate.  I  am  afraid  this  is  true. 
If  it  is  true,  it  is  simply  because,  without  in  the 
least  meaning  to  do  so,  he  would  speak  with  this 
air  of  superiority,  which  was  really  droll.  I  do 
not  think  myself  that  he  was  an  arrogant  man. 


A  YEAR   LATER  197 

He  did  sometimes  think  of  himself  more  highly 
than  he  ought  to  think;  but  that  is  a  fault 
which  most  members  of  most  Senates  share 
with  him.  There  was  a  certain  frankness  of 
manner,  almost  rustic  or  pagan,  if  one  may  say 
so,  which  ruffled  people  and  made  them  cross 
when  he  did  not  even  suspect  that  he  was 
"riling"  them.  It  is  interesting  to  see  how 
good-naturedly  Lincoln  took  this,  and  how  well 
he  understood  Mr.  Sumner,  through  and  through. 

A   YEAR   LATER 

Here  is  a  letter  of  my  own,  of  a  year  later, 
which  shows  how  varied  were  the  interests  in 
Washington  life  in  the  year  1863  :  — 

"  The  guests  were  Admiral  Davis,  General  Force, 
just  now  from  Vicksburg ;  Colonel  Abbot,  in 
command  of  the  defences  opposite  the  city ;  Mr. 
Collins,  from  Asia,  who  spoke  of  a  despatch  he 
had  just  had  from  Irkutsk,  and  is  engaged  now 
in  building  the  telegraph  up  to  Behring's  Straits;1 
Dr.  Adams,  of  the  Medical  Bureau,  a  sort  of  aid 
of  Surgeon-General  Hammon's,  fresh  from  a  tour 

1  This  telegraph  was  built  some  ten  years  before  its  time  and 
was  never  of  any  use,  but  that  the  Indians  regarded  it  as  a  God- 
sent  magazine  of  wire.  Indeed,  I  believe  they  use  it  as  such  to 
this  day.  Wire  is  a  great  treasure  in  a  savage  land. 


198        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

of  inspection  at  the  West,  and  a  Colonel  Cun 
ningham.  The  ladies  were  only  the  three  pretty 
Miss  Abbots,  and  Mary  certainly  did  the  honors 
charmingly.  I  see  I  have  not  named  Mr.  Chan- 
ning,1  who  was  very  bright  and  came  out  very 
pleasantly.  I  do  not  know  when  I  have  been  at 
a  brighter  party.  What  is  striking,  as  soon  as 
you  are  among  the  military  or  naval  men,  is 
their  sweet,  simple  loyalty,  their  indifference  to 
politics,  and  their  confidence  of  success.  General 
Force  said  that  he  rode  down  to  Natchez  to  see 
a  city  which  had  not  been  injured  by  the  war. 
There  he  found  children  playing  in  the  streets, 
ladies  in  the  verandas,  and  the  city  as  beautiful 
as  ever.  '  And  the  men  ? '  we  asked.  '  The 
men,'  he  said,  had  been  '  strong  enough  and  of 
influence  enough  to  keep  themselves  from  being 
hanged ;  they  had  sworn  they  would  not  go  into 
the  rebel  army,  had  their  property  seized  because 
they  would  not,  but  had  protected  their  families 
against  guerillas,  and  so  had  roughed  through. 
And  old  Dr.  Duncan,'  said  he,  '  told  me  he 
counted  himself  worth  a  million  and  three  hun 
dred  thousand  dollars  when  the  war  began,  that 
he  would  gladly  take  fifteen  thousand  dollars  in 
greenbacks  for  all  that  was  left,  "  but  the  sight 

1  Rev.  William  H.  Channing. 


MY   FIRST   AND    LAST   BATTLE  199 

of  the  old  flag,"  said  he,  "  was  worth  it  all."  Is 
not  that  really  touching  —  to  know  there  is  some 
such  feeling  somewhere  ?  Admiral  Davis  told  a 
curious  story,  illustrating  the  English  confidence 
in  our  ruin.  After  Bull  Run,  their  Hydrographic 
Office  did  not  send  the  annual  relay  of  charts 
which  it  is  their  custom  to  send  to  the  different 
departments  of  our  Government.  And  for  more 
than  that  year,  through  the  next  year,  they  dis 
continued  them,  but  as  soon  as  we  opened  the 
Mississippi  last  year,  they  thought  the  chance  of 
the  charts  being  taken  care  of  amounted  to  more, 
and  began  to  send  them  again.  Mr.  Channing 
gave  a  very  interesting  account  of  the  exciting 
debate  in  the  House  on  the  proposed  expulsion 
of  Lane  and  Harris  to-day.  I  had  heard  a  part 
of  this  discussion,  but  had  no  sense  of  the  feeling 
it  had  really  excited  upon  the  floor.  All  this 
sort  of  anecdote  makes  you  feel  that  you  really 
are  in  the  midst  of  things." 

MY  FIKST   AND   LAST   BATTLE 

A  year  later  still  I  saw  an  army  for  the  first 
time.  It  seemed  to  me  that  I  had  seen  every 
detail  of  preparation  at  Readville,  where  our  own 
regiments  were  soldiered.  I  had  followed  along 
all  the  business  where  raw  volunteers  were  taken 


200        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

into  camp  and  regiments  got  in  order  for  the 
front.  At  Fort  Independence,  in  the  harbor, 
there  was  apt  to  be  a  regiment,  or  more,  going 
through  the  same  process.  On  Sundays  one  or 
another  of  us  went  down  there  to  see  the  boys 
and  preach  to  them.  We  knew  all  about  shirts 
and  underclothing  and  hospital  stores,  and,  alas ! 
we  began  to  know  about  pensions  and  State 
relief.  We  had  more  than  enough  to  do  with 
widows  and  children  of  men  who  had  been  killed, 
and  with  women  who  were  virtually  widowed, 
though  their  husbands  were  alive  at  the  front. 
We  had  sent  everything  to  the  hospital  stores 
—  testaments,  playing-cards,  fans,  mosquito  hel 
mets,  and  havelocks.  But,  all  the  same,  I  wanted 
to  see  an  army,  and  in  April,  1864,  I  went  to 
Washington  determined  to  do  so  if  I  could.  I 
stayed  in  Washington  from  the  8th  of  March 
until  the  llth.  On  the  Sunday  the  memoran 
dum  in  my  note-book  is :  "  Preached  at  the  capi 
tal,  new  brief,  '  Compel  them  to  come  in.' '  It 
was  on  this  visit  that  I  called  on  the  President. 

They  all  told  me  that  no  civilian  would  be 
permitted  in  the  camp  of  Grant's  army.  But  I 
found  that  I  could  go  down  to  Fort  Monroe  and 
see  General  Butler's  army. 

I  had  met  General  Butler  that  winter  at  a 


MY   FIRST   AND   LAST   BATTLE  201 

dinner  given  him  in  Boston,  where  I  sat  by  him, 
and  we  had  an  interesting  conversation  for  the 
evening.  He  had  invited  me  cordially  to  come 
and  see  him  at  Fort  Monroe.  On  this  occasion 
I  had  Sanitary  business  of  importance  enough 
to  justify  my  going  down  the  bay  to  the  fort. 
And  I  went  to  Norfolk  on  the  12th  of  April. 
There  I  was  the  guest  of  General  Wild  —  one 
of  our  Massachusetts  generals  —  who  was  at 
that  moment  very  much  interested  in  the  mus 
tering  and  employment  of  colored  troops. 

On  the  14th  of  April  I  crossed  to  Fort  Monroe, 
where  I  was  immediately  welcomed  by  General 
Butler.  And  he  fairly  compelled  me  by  his  exu 
berant  courtesy  to  make  my  home  at  his  house.  I 
spent  four  or  five  days  very  pleasantly  there.  On 
the  afternoon  of  Sunday,  the  17th,  he  ordered  a 
review  of  colored  troops  on  the  broad  beach  to  the 
east  and  north  of  the  fortress.  There  were  more 
than  five  thousand  men  under  arms,  mostly  ne 
groes,  proud  of  their  new  position.  Over  at 
Hampton,  opposite,  they  sing  to  this  hour  the 
hymn  which  General  Armstrong  liked  so  much:  — 

"  We  look  like  men, 
We  look  like  men, 
We  look  like  men  of  war, 
All  armed  and  dressed  in  uniform, 
And  ready  for  the  war." 


202        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

And  Butler  told  me  that  in  the  movements  of 
the  Peninsula  these  men  could  be  placed  where 
you  would  think  no  troops  could  stand.  They 
were  paying  off  the  debts  of  generations. 

On  Monday  he  sent  me  round  to  Yorktown 
and  Gloucester,  where  my  friend  General  Joseph 
Hawley  was  in  command.  I  saw  a  little  then 
of  the  life  of  soldiers  in  the  field.  When  on 
Tuesday  I  bade  General  Butler  good-by,  I  said 
to  him  :  "  The  next  time  you  see  me  I  shall  be 
a  recruit,  and  I  shall  present  arms  to  you  at  this 
gateway,  as  you  are  riding  in."  He  said,  eagerly, 
"  Why,  if  you  will  come,  Mr.  Hale,  we  will  take 
you  to-day.  We  will  put  you  in  the  forefront 
of  the  battle,  as  David  put  Uriah.  I  suppose 
there  would  have  been  nothing  wrong  in  that 
if  Uriah  had  asked  David  to  place  him  there." 
With  this  farewell  I  came  home,  little  thinking 
that  I  should  so  soon  have  his  invitation  —  shall 
I  say,  to  take  Uriah's  place  ? 

But,  as  I  knew,  the  joint  movement  by  the 
Army  of  the  James  River,  on  the  south,  with 
Grant's  army  on  the  north,  was  impending. 
And  I  had  been  at  home  but  little  more  than 
three  weeks  when  I  received  a  telegram  from 
Colonel  Shaffer,  Butler's  Chief  of  Staff,  dated  at 
Bermuda  Hundred,  a  point  which  Butler  had 


MY   FIRST   AND    LAST   BATTLE  203 

seized  successfully  at  the  junction  of  the  Appo- 
mattox  and  the  James  rivers.  The  despatch 
read,  "  Come  on  at  once ;  we  are  more  successful 
than  our  best  hopes."  Who  could  resist  such  an 
invitation  ?  Not  I ;  and  I  left  my  plough  in  the 
furrow.  I  arranged  somehow  for  my  pulpit,  and 
went  at  once  to  Washington.  I  called  on  my 
old  friend  Edward  Townsend,  who  was  Adjutant- 
general,  I  think,  of  the  army.  He  had  been  a 
boy  in  the  Latin  School  with  me,  and  was  a  few 
years  my  senior.  I  showed  him  my  invitation, 
told  him  I  thought  I  could  be  of  use  in  Sanitary 
matters,  and  he  gave  me  a  despatch  for  General 
Butler.  It  proved  to  be  a  talisman  such  as 
Aladdin  used  to  carry.  From  that  moment  I 
was  a  bearer  of  despatches  and  could  take  great 
airs  on  myself.  I  went  down  the  river  at  once 
to  Fort  Monroe  and  reported  there,  to  find  that 
all  my  friends  of  the  staff,  with  one  exception, 
were  in  the  army  at  the  front,  and  that  a  steamer 
was  going  up  in  the  morning  on  which  I  could 
go. 

We  were  rather  more  than  halfway  up  the 
river  when  we  were  arrested  for  a  little  by  the 
sound  of  firing  on  the  shore.  It  proved  that 
this  was  one  of  the  days  when  Fitzhugh  Lee 
had  attempted  to  cut  off  General  Butler's  river 


204        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

communications.  He  had  attacked  the  field 
works  which  we  had  on  the  south  side  of  the 
river.  As  it  happened,  some  of  these  works 
were  held  by  negroes  recruited  in  Virginia,  and 
this  was  one  of  the  earlier  trials  of  those  troops. 
After  a  little  delay  on  this  account,  we  pressed 
on;  and  just  about  nightfall  arrived  at  the 
crowded  water-front  of  Bermuda  Hundred.  The 
whole  army  of  twenty-five  thousand  men  had  ar 
rived  there  suddenly  a  fortnight  before,  as  if  it 
had  fallen  from  the  skies.  In  that  time  wharves 
and  landing-places  had  been  improvised  with 
marvellous  rapidity;  and  although  there  was 
endless  confusion,  still  things  seemed  to  go  for 
ward  with  the  kind  of  energy  which  marks  the 
work  of  a  well-disciplined  army. 

For  me,  I  was  as  ignorant  as  a  freshman  is 
on  entering  college  of  what  I  was  to  do.  I 
knew  that  General  Butler  and  his  staff  were  six 
or  seven  miles  away.  I  knew  that  night  was 
falling,  and  I  did  not  know  how  I  was  to  go  to 
him.  Fortunately  for  me,  as  I  thought,  there 
was  on  the  boat  a  member  of  his  staff  with 
whom  I  had  some  acquaintance,  and  I  relied 
upon  him  to  help  me  through.  When  we  landed, 
however,  he  was  out  of  the  way,  and  I  could 
not  find  him.  I  suspected  that  he  did  not  care 


MY   FIRST   AND   LAST   BATTLE  205 

to  embarrass  himself  with  a  civilian  and  was 
intentionally  keeping  out  of  sight.  I  think  so 
still. 

I  therefore  did  what  I  always  do  in  life  — 
struck  as  high  as  I  could.  I  said  to  the  sentinel 
that  I  was  a  bearer  of  despatches,  and  asked 
him  the  way  to  the  headquarters  of  the  com 
mander  of  that  post.  This  gentleman  was  Colo 
nel  Fuller  of  Massachusetts.  He  said  at  once 
that  his  own  orderly  should  go  with  me  to  Gen 
eral  Butler ;  that  the  Colonel  would  lend  me  his 
own  horse,  and  would  send  my  valise  on  the 
ambulance  the  next  morning.  So  the  horse  was 
saddled,  and  about  the  time  when  it  became 
quite  dark  the  soldier  and  I  started  on  our  way. 

He  knew  no  more  of  the  road  than  I  did,  and 
a  very  bad  road  it  was.  I  made  my  first  ac 
quaintance  with  the  sacred  soil  of  Virginia  then 
and  there.  We  lost  ourselves  sometimes,  and 
then  we  found  ourselves,  the  greater  part  of  the 
road  being  the  worst  possible  country  road,  all 
cut  to  pieces  by  the  heavy  army  work,  through 
woods,  not  of  large  trees,  which  were  close 
enough  on  both  sides  to  darken  the  passage.  It 
was  nine  o'clock  or  later  when  we  saw  the  wel 
come  sight  of  the  headquarters  camp-fires. 

We  rode  up  and  I   jumped  from   my   horse 


206        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

to  shake  hands  with  General  Butler,  Colonel 
Shaffer,  and  the  other  gentlemen.  They  asked 
instantly  how  we  had  passed  the  batteries.  I 
told  the  story,  and  General  Butler,  who  was 
always  effusively  polite,  and  who  to  his  other 
gracious  ways  added  exquisite  facility  in  flattery, 
said  to  me :  "  We  are  greatly  obliged  to  you, 
Mr.  Hale ;  I  have  been  very  anxious  for  two  or 
three  hours.  I  was  afraid  my  despatches  were 
cut  off."  I  had  already  handed  to  him  the 
utterly  unimportant  letter  from  the  War  Depart 
ment  which  had  been  my  talisman  thus  far. 

Then  and  there  I  first  heard  soldiers  talk  of 
what  had  been  done  and  what  had  not  been 
done  in  that  day.  I  knew  beforehand  that,  in 
the  push  toward  Richmond,  we  had  been  flung 
back  on  Fort  Darling.  I  did  not  know,  till  I 
came  there,  exactly  how  the  command  was  im 
pressed  by  this  delay.  But  in  the  headquarters 
circle  I  found  nothing  but  confidence,  and  I 
very  soon  saw  that  I  was  to  understand  that 
we  should  have  taken  Richmond  but  for  the 
heavy  fog  of  the  day  of  battle  and  some  other 
infelicities.  I  think  now  this  is  probably  true. 

The  fires  were  kept  burning,  and  we  sat  and 
chatted  there  hour  after  hour.  When  we  had 
been  there  perhaps  two  hours,  up  came  my  dila- 


MY   FIRST   AND   LAST   BATTLE  207 

tory  military  friend  of  the  General's  staff,  and 
with  sufficient  profanity  exorcised  the  roads  over 
which  we  had  ridden.  He  had  never  been  there 
before.  General  Butler  heard  him  through,  and 
then  said,  "  But  here  is  Mr.  Hale,  who  has  been 
here  two  hours."  The  soldier  turned  on  me,  a 
little  crestfallen  —  all  the  other  members  of  the 
staff  sufficiently  amused  —  and  he  asked  me  with 
another  oath  how  I  found  the  way.  I  said, 
"  We  followed  the  telegraph  wire ;  "  and  from 
that  day  I  was  rather  a  favorite  with  the  staff 
for  this  civilian  snub  on  a  gentleman  who  was 
not  a  favorite. 

Mean-while,  somebody  had  been  ordered  to 
pitch  a  tent  for  me,  and  about  eleven  o'clock, 
I  suppose,  I  went  to  bed  in  my  new  quarters. 
I  had  slept  an  hour,  however,  as  it  proved, 
when  I  was  awakened  by  the  firing  of  cannon. 
I  had  never  heard  such  firing ;  as  it  proved 
afterward,  they  were  the  heaviest  guns  which 
I  ha^ve  ever  heard  in  my  life.  Of  course  I 
wanted  to  jump  up,  but  I  said  to  myself:  "It 
will  seem  very  green  if  I  walk  out  on  the  first 
sound  of  firing.  I  suppose  this  is  what  I  came 
to  the  front  for.  If  they  want  me  they  will 
call  me,  and  I  shall  hear  firing  enough  before 
I  have  done."  So  I  turned  over  and  tried  to 


208         MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

go  to  sleep  —  did  go  to  sleep  —  and  was  awakened 
again  by  louder  and  louder  firing.  All  this  lasted, 
I  suppose,  perhaps  an  hour,  perhaps  two.  Then 
all  was  still,  and  I  went  to  sleep  for  the  night. 

You  are  awakened  in  camp,  if  you  are  at  a 
major-general's,  by  the  bugles  of  his  cavalry 
escort,  and  the  next  morning  I  heard  their 
reveille  also  for  the  first  time.  I  washed  myself, 
I  was  already  dressed  of  course,  and  in  a  little  time 
an  orderly  told  me  that  breakfast  was  ready.  I 
met  at  breakfast  Captain  Laurie,  a  fine  old  officer 
of  the  navy  whom  I  had  known  slightly  in  Bos 
ton.  He  said  to  me,  "  And  how  did  you  like 
our  firing  last  night,  Mr.  Hale  ? "  I  said  that 
to  me,  as  a  civilian,  it  seemed  very  loud ;  but 
I  supposed  that  that  was  what  I  had  come  to  war 
for,  and  I  did  not  get  up  from  my  bed.  Laurie 
answered  as  if  he  would  rebuke  me  for  my  ignor 
ance,  "  I  have  been  in  the  service  for  thirty-nine 
years  and  I  have  never  heard  such  firing  before." 
I  found  then,  for  the  first  time,  that  the  whole 
staff  had  been  up  and  on  horseback,  had  been  at 
the  front  to  try  to  find  out  what  this  firing  was, 
and  had  returned  almost  as  much  perplexed  as 
they  went. 

It  was  thus  that  it  happened  to  me  that  I  spent 
my  first  and  last  battle  in  bed. 


MY   FIRST   AND   LAST   BATTLE  209 

I  was  acting  on  the  principles  of  doing  the  duty 
which  came  next  my  hand  and  obeying  all  orders 
which  were  given  to  me  by  constituted  authori 
ties.  I  had  not  run  away ;  I  was  pleased  with 
that.  And  if  I  had  not  personally  received  the 
surrender  of  three  or  four  battle-flags,  that  was 
my  misfortune. 

I  had  occasion  afterward  to  hear,  not  to  say 
report,  much  of  the  testimony,  and  to  read  all 
the  rest  of  it,  which  related  to  this  remarkable 
battle.  If  you  wrill  read  the  history  of  the  time, 
as  told  in  the  Richmond  newspapers  and  those 
of  New  York  City,  and  will  put  them  together, 
you  will  learn  that  on  that  night  a  reconnois- 
sance  was  sent  out  from  our  lines  into  the  tangled 
shrubbery  which  separated  our  newly  built  works 
from  those  of  the  rebels.  You  will  learn  that 
the  rebel  guns  mowed  down  these  columns  as 
corn  is  mowed  down  before  a  tempest.  Or,  if 
you  read  a  Northern  newspaper,  you  will  learn 
that  a  certain  column  of  the  rebel  troops,  who 
were  named,  were  worse  than  decimated  by  simi 
lar  artillery  from  our  works. 

Every  word  of  this  was  entirely  false.  In  fact, 
there  was  a  very  heavy  cannonading  from  the 
newly  erected  works  on  both  sides.  As  I  have 
said,  it  lasted  an  hour  or  two.  Much  of  it  on 

VOL.  II.  —  P 


210        MEMORIES   OF   A  HUNDRED   YEARS 

our  side  was  from  heavy  guns  which  had  been 
landed  from  the  navy  to  strengthen  the  battery 
which  we  had  near  the  river.  But  as  the  result 
of  it  all,  there  was  never  any  evidence  that  a 
rabbit  was  scratched.  Certainly  no  drop  of 
human  blood  was  shed  in  that  encounter  of 
giants. 

How  it  happened  so  late  in  the  evening  I  do 
not  know.  But  what  happened  was  this :  A 
party  of  ladies  had  been  entertained  on  board 
one  of  our  ships  of  war.  As  they  left  an  officer, 
with  the  gallantry  of  his  profession,  asked  one 
of  the  ladies  if  she  would  like  to  see  how  a  gun 
was  fired,  and  to  do  pleasure  to  her  he  fired  one 
of  the  guns  in  the  darkness.  At  that  moment 
everything  was  on  the  qiii  vive  ashore,  and  our 
land-battery  men,  eager  for  something  to  do, 
finding  that  one  shot  was  fired,  thought  that 
another  had  better  be  fired,  and  continued  firing. 
This  started  the  successive  artillerists  for  nearly 
a  mile,  as  our  works  ran  up  into  the  country 
toward  the  Appomattox  River,  and,  not  to  be 
belated  or  accused  of  sleepiness,  successive  bat 
teries  began  firing  in  turn.  Of  course  this  roused 
the  equally  ready  artillerists  on  the  rebel  side, 
and  they  fired  —  I  suppose  at  the  flashes  which 
they  saw  a  mile  or  two  away.  And  this  was  the 


MY   FIRST   AND   LAST   BATTLE  211 

famous  cannonade  which  made  the  whole  of  my 
first  battle. 

The  naval  officers  were  dreadfully  mortified, 
our  gentlemen  at  headquarters  were  indignant 
beyond  account,  and  the  thing  almost  came  to 
courts-martial  and  courts  of  inquiry.  But  it  was 
wisely  thought  better  to  leave  the  record  of  it  to 
be  made  at  the  end  of  thirty  years  by  the  only 
person  who  was  at  all  concerned,  who  spent  the 
hours  of  the  battle  in  his  bed  under  canvas. 

Such  was  my  first  and  last  battle.  Since 
Shaffer's  triumphant  despatch  to  me  things  had 
not  taken  so  cheerful  a  turn.  As  soon  as  General 
Butler  had  established  his  position  at  Bermuda 
Hundred  he  had  felt  his  enemy  on  the  side  of 
Richmond,  which  is  hardly  fifteen  miles  away. 
He  had  a  good  army  of  men  under  good  leaders 
and  in  great  spirits,  and  he  made  a  bold  forward 
movement.  I  think,  as  I  said,  a  good  many  of 
them  felt  to  the  day  of  their  death  that  they  would 
have  been  in  Richmond  the  night  of  that  move 
ment  but  for  a  heavy  fog  which  disconcerted 
all  plans.  Men  and  companies,  not  to  say  regi 
ments,  were  lost  in  the  fog.  They  all  called  it 
"fighting  in  a  fog."  The  gentleman  who  com 
manded  our  right  wing  told  me  that  he  made  his 
aides  carry  little  sticks  with  them  which  they 


212        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

drove  down  in  this  place  and  that  place,  that 
they  might  be  able  to  mark  in  the  darkness  the 
direction  of  their  routes.  And  although  there 
was  no  defeat,  at  the  end  of  the  day  nothing 
had  happened. 

For  me,  as  soon  as  I  arrived  I  was  most  cor 
dially  welcomed  by  the  staff.  I  was  immediately 
registered  as  a  member  of  the  staff,  and  I  spent 
the  better  part  of  a  fortnight  under  canvas. 
After  one  day  I  saw  that  a  civilian  was  entirely 
out  of  place  in  camp;  that  I  was  in  every 
body's  way.  Of  course  I  was  very  anxious  to 
make  myself  useful.  I  was  sitting  with  Gen 
eral  Butler  himself  in  his  tent  —  a  tent,  by  the 
way,  which  had  a  curious  history  —  when  he 
asked  me  to  strike  a  bell  on  the  table.  An 
orderly  came  in  and  the  General  said,  "  Go  tell 
Lieutenant  Davenport  that  I  want  him."  I  said : 
"  You  are  going  to  call  Davenport  to  write  short 
hand.  He  is  at  work  with  the  court-martial. 
Do  not  send  for  him.  Use  me."  Butler,  as  I 
said,  was  always  profuse  in  his  courtesies,  and 
he  affected  at  once  that  it  would  be  a  great  ser 
vice  to  him  if  I  would  write ;  that  he  did  not 
want  to  detach  Davenport  from  the  court-martial ; 
and  so  it  happened  that  all  the  time  I  was  with 
him  I  acted  as  his  personal  secretary  from  eight 


MY   FIRST   AND   LAST   BATTLE  213 

in  the  morning  until  one  every  day.  Somebody 
else  then  took  my  place,  and  I  in  the  afternoon 
wrote  out  the  letters  and  other  notes  which  we 
had  made  in  the  morning.  Thus  for  that  week 
and  more  I  was  behind  the  scenes,  seeing  the 
administration  of  a  great  army  in  all  its  largest 
affairs  and  in  its  smallest  detail.  This  was  the 
good  I  then  got  out  of  learning  to  write  short 
hand  in  the  Brattle  Street  Meeting-house  when 
I  was  ten  years  old. 

My  campaign  ended  just  when  General  Will 
iam  F.  Smith  was  ordered  off  with  his  army 
corps  to  strengthen  Grant's  army  on  its  advance 
from  the  North.  Butler  was  sick  that  after 
noon —  sick  from  rage  and  disappointment  that 
half  his  command  was  taken  away  from  him. 
He  said  to  me,  "  General  Smith  is  coming  to 
dine  with  me,  but  I  must  go  to  bed,  and  you 
must  entertain  him."  So  Smith  and  I  sat 
together  at  a  rather  gruesome  dinner.  I  said 
to  him,  "  You  are  all  disappointed  that  your 
corps  is  ordered  to  the  North."  Smith  said, 
"  Humanly  speaking,  Mr.  Hale,  I  was  as  sure 
of  being  in  Petersburg  to-morrow  morning  at 
eight  o'clock  as  you  are  that  you  are  sitting 
on  that  chair." 

The  truth  was,  we  had  planned  this  attack 


214        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

on  Petersburg,  and  the  Department  at  Washing 
ton,  which  had  but  little  confidence  in  us,  had 
ordered  Smith  off  just  in  time  to  defeat  us. 
Instead  of  taking  Petersburg,  his  corps  were 
thrown  into  the  carnage  of  Cold  Harbor. 

That  afternoon,  Sunday,  General  Butler  sat 
with  me  on  the  side  of  a  hill,  as  we  saw  Smith's 
division  pass  from  his  command.  He  told  me 
a  good  deal  of  his  early  life.  Among  other 
incidents,  he  told  me  of  a  curious  chance  by 
which  he  was  compelled  to  give  up  his  plans 
for  serving  under  the  Emperor  of  China,  plans 
in  which  he  would  have  taken  the  place  which 
Chinese  Gordon  took  afterward.  For  those 
plans  the  marquee  had  been  made  in  which  I 
had  dined  that  day. 

Alas !  we  were  not  in  Petersburg  for  well-nigh 
a  year.  But  in  the  next  April  the  end  came. 
I  have  had  the  account  of  the  sixty  miles'  inarch 
up  the  Appomattox  Valley,  which  brought  the 
war  to  an  end,  from  the  lips  of  Robert  Lincoln, 
who  was  on  Grant's  staff,  and  of  General  Ord 
himself,  who  directed  that  wing  of  the  army. 
Ord  told  me  the  story  as,  in  Texas,  we  sat  by 
the  marble  table  on  which  the  articles  of  sur 
render  were  written.  General  Ord  had  bought 
it  as  a  historical  memorial  from  the  Virginian 


MY   FIRST   AND    LAST   BATTLE  215 

owner  at  the  Appomattox  Court-house.  I 
have  heard  Bouve  of  Washburn's  force  give  his 
dramatic  account  of  the  gallant  movement  of 
the  headquarters  cavalry,  under  our  Colonel 
Washburn,  of  Lancaster,  the  last  martyr  of  the 
war  in  Massachusetts,  which  met  the  enemy  at 
High  Bridge,  and  really  determined  Lee  to  sur 
render.  That  battle  at  High  Bridge  ended  the 
war,  and  in  my  judgment,  is  the  most  dramatic 
event  in  the  war.  As  yet  we  have"  no  "  Ballad 
of  High  Bridge,"  but  let  us  hope  that  the  boy  is 
living  who  will  write  one. 

For  what  men  wanted  to  write  in  those  days, 
we  had,  besides  the  newspapers,  the  North  Amer 
ican  Review,  edited  by  Lowell,  the  Atlantic 
Monthly,  and  the  Christian  Examiner  —  of 
which  I  was  myself  one  of  the  working  editors, 
—  under  the  admirable  lead  of  Dr.  Frederic 
Henry  Hedge.  We  boys  used  to  call  him  "  The 
Chief,"  as  indeed  he  was.  For  young  editors, 
who  do  not  understand  the  great  necessity  of 
promptness  in  a  magazine,  I  will  tell  two  stories 
of  things  which  wounded  me  at  the  time  and 
which  point  a  lesson  for  those  who  conduct 
journals.  Mr.  William  Cullen  Bryant,  for  whom 
I  worked  at  one  time,  laid  down  the  rule  thus, 
"  If  you  do  not  use  an  article  on  the  day  for 


216        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

which  it  is  written,  do  not  use  it  at  all."  This 
is  too  strong,  but  even  in  the  exaggeration  there 
is  a  great  truth  hidden,  as  the  philosophers 
would  say. 

I  was,  so  to  speak,  on  the  staff  of  the 
Atlantic.  This  means  that  I  was  very  intimate 
with  Phillips  and,  indeed,  with  Sampson  who 
published  it.  I  was  in  and  out  at  their  pub 
lication  office  till  they  died,  I  had  been  for 
twenty  years  on  the  closest  personal  terms 
with  Lowell,  and  when  the  firm  of  Fields 
and  Osgood  took  the  magazine,  I  was  very  in 
timate  with  the  dear  Fields.  So  it  happened 
that  when  in  January,  1860,  I  came  home  from 
England  I  wrote  for  them  an  article  on  the 
"  Working-men's  College  "  which  had,  just  then, 
been  founded  by  Frederic  Denison  Maurice,  and 
I  told  in  the  article  a  story  of  my  meeting 
Thomas  Hughes  there,  for  the  first  time. 

The  point  of  the  story  rested  in  this.  That 
as  he  was  watching  a  drill  of  an  awkward  squad 
in  the  little  garden  behind  the  college  building  in 
Ormond  Street,  London,  the  drill  sergeant  came 
up  and  asked  for  two  more  men  to  fill  out  the 
files;  and  Hughes  turned  to  two  of  us  —  both 
Americans  —  and  asked  if  we  would  not  fall  in. 
"  You  only  need  to  know  your  facings  !  "  Alas 


MY   FIRST   AND   LAST   BATTLE  217 

and  alas  !  neither  of  us  did  know  our  facings, 
and  we  had  to  confess  it. 

Yet  at  that  moment  I  was  registered  some 
where  as  a  private  in  the  army  of  Massachusetts, 
and  somewhere  there  was  a  musket  and  cartridge 
box  for  me. 

This  story  I  told,  not  to  my  own  advantage, 
in  my  article  on  the  "  Working-men's  College," 
and  sent  the  article  to  the  editor  of  the  Atlantic 
who  accepted  it.  I  forgot  it,  and  I  suppose  he 
did.  Imagine  my  disgust,  when  the  number 
for  April,  1861,  came  out  —  that  fatal  April, — 
when  I  was  drilling  and  being  drilled,  when 
I  wore  a  uniform  jacket,  and  could  drill 
men  who  were  to  be  major-generals  —  this  ven 
erable  article  appeared  revealing  to  a  cynical 
wrorld  the  fact  that  I  did  not  know  my  facings  ! 

Even  harder  fortune  waited  on  another  article 
of  mine,  the  story  of  "  A  Man  Without  a  Coun 
try."  In  the  very  heart  of  the  war,  Vallan- 
digham,  an  Ohio  politician,  said  on  some  public 
occasion,  that  he  did  not  want  to  belong  to  a 
country  which  did  what  Lincoln  and  the  Govern 
ment  were  doing.  Military  law  prevailed  in  Ohio 
in  those  days,  and  General  Burnside,  who  was  in 
command  there,  arrested  Vallandigham,  as  a 
traitor,  I  suppose,  and  sent  him  into  the  Confed- 


218        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

erate  lines  with  his  compliments  to  the  general ; 
we  did  not  want  such  people,  he  said ;  perhaps 
they  did. 

With  a  certain  pluck  which  characterizes  Ohio, 
perhaps,  the  Democratic  party  nominated  this 
man  for  Governor  of  that  State  to  be  candidate 
in  the  election  of  October,  1863.  I  told  Fields 
of  the  Atlantic  at  once,  that  I  had  in  my  ink 
stand  the  story  of  "  A  Man  Without  a  Country," 
that  this  would  be  a  good  time  for  it ;  and  that 
if  he  could  print  it  in  his  September  number,  he 
should  have  it  in  time  for  the  Ohio  election. 
Fields  agreed,  and  I  wrote  the  story,  which 
had  required  a  great  deal  of  study  for  its  details. 
I  had  had  it  in  mind  long  before.  I  was  spend 
ing  the  summer  in  Worcester,  and  the  library  of 
the  Antiquarian  Society  gave  me  what  no  other 
library  in  America  could  have  given  me  so  well, 
—  the  material  for  local  color  as  to  Aaron 
Burr  and  to  my  Philip  Nolan. 

Accordingly,  the  article  was  in  type  before 
September.  But  alas !  not  printed,  not  even 
in  October  or  November.  And  Mr.  Vallan- 
digham  was  hopelessly  defeated  in  the  October 
election  with  no  credit  to  poor  me. 

I  had  a  standing  agreement  with  Fields  that 
I  would  write  for  the  Atlantic  articles  to  keep 


MY   FIRST   AND    LAST   BATTLE  219 

up  people's  courage.  This  was  when  people  felt 
very  blue,  in  the  middle  of  the  war.  There  are 
one  or  two  of  these  articles  without  my  name,  I 
believe.  Those  which  bear  my  name  are : 
"  Solid  Operations  in  Virginia,"  "  A  Man  With 
out  a  Country,"  "  Northern  Invasions,"  "  How 
to  use  Victory,"  "How  Mr.  Frye  would  have 
Preached  it." 

As  every  one  is  dead  now,  I  suppose  I  may  say 
that  this  last  story  covers  in  a  parable  the  rela 
tions  of  General  Butler  with  General  Banks. 

As  I  have  referred  to  Mr.  Vallandigham  above, 
I  will  tell  the  tragic  story  of  his  death.  He 
returned  to  Ohio,  and  was  highly  esteemed  there 
as  a  lawyer,  and  as  such  had  a  large  practice. 

He  had  to  defend  a  person  accused  of  murder. 
He  formed  a  theory  that  the  dead  man  had 
killed  himself.  He  tried  in  his  argument  to 
convince  the  jury  that  it  was  so;  so  he  carried 
a  pistol  into  court.  He  showed  how  he  supposed 
the  man  carried  his.  He  handled  the  pistol 
freely.  He  put  it  to  his  own  breast,  —  and 
then,  carried  away  by  his  own  imagination,  he 
said,  "  He  fired  the  pistol,  gentlemen ! "  fired 
his  own,  and  fell  dead. 


LITERATURE 


CHAPTER  VI 
LITERATURE 

NO,  we  will  not  deceive  ourselves. 
The    physical    power    at    almost   every 
man's  hand  in  the  United  States  is  now  a  thou 
sand  times  greater  than  it  was  in  1801. 

Thus  there  were  then  only  five  steam  engines 
in  the  country.  All  together  they  did  not  use  as 
much  power  as  is  used  in  one  large  locomotive 
to-day. 

Two  "  power-houses  in  Niagara "  utilize  fifty 
thousand  "  horse-power  "  where  within  ten  miles 
in  1801  there  was  not  so  much  as  one  horse, 
serving  man  or  God. 

An  ocean  steamship,  in  her  six  days'  voyage 
from  New  York  to  Liverpool,  develops  more 
power  than  Cheops  had  at  his  command  when  he 
built  the  great  Pyramid. 

But  these  are  only  physical  victories. 

They  are  second  to  the  victories  or  steps  of 
advance  which  the  country  has  won  in  its  knowl- 

223 


224        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

edge  of  the  Eternities — in  men's  progress  in 
Faith  and  Hope  and  Love. 

My  father  was  a  printer.  And  there  were 
much  larger  offices  in  the  United  States.  But  it 
was  a  printing-office.  He  printed,  by  the  water- 
power  of  the  Back  Bay  in  Boston,  editions  of  the 
Bible,  from  stereotype  plates.  He  printed  for 
the  owners  of  such  plates  many  other  standard 
books.  He  also  printed  the  Boston  Daily 
Advertiser,  the  Semi-Weekly  Advertiser  and  the 
Weekly  Messenger.  The  circulation  of  these 
papers  was  as  nothing  to  the  circulation  of 
newspapers  in  our  time.  But  the  Advertiser 
appeared  six  times  and  the  semi-weekly  twice 
a  week.  The  size  of  these  papers  would 
now  be  called  diminutive,  but  there  were  a 
great  many  of  them.  When  he  died  in  1863, 
I  had  the  curiosity  to  calculate  the  number  of 
pages,  and  even  of  words,  which  he  had  printed, 
and  I  satisfied  myself  that  he  had  printed  more 
words  in  that  half  century  than  would  have 
been  found  in  all  the  libraries  in  the  world  the 
day  the  century  came  in. 

Or  compare  colleges  and  schools.  Massachu 
setts  has  stood  as  well  as  any  State  in  arrange 
ments  for  education.  In  1800  she  had  two 
colleges,  and  in  both  there  were  hardly  two  hun- 


LITERATURE 


225 


dred  students.  In  the  same  State  there  are  now 
thirteen  colleges,  of  which  the  largest  has  5124 
students  and  teachers,  and  the  smallest,  I  suppose, 
four  hundred.  The  average  attendance  of  col 
legiate  students  is  probably  one  hundred  times 
as  large  as  it  was  then. 


STOUGHTON  HALL,  HARVARD  COLLEGE. 
Built  after  Old  Stoughton  was  burned  down  in  1775. ' 

In  more  than  twenty  towns  in  Massachusetts 
there  are  now  well-equipped  buildings  for  high 
schools,  each  more  costly  and  on  a  larger  scale 
than  any  building  which  Harvard  College  had 
when  I  graduated  in  1839. 


VOL.    II.  —  Q 


226        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

In  1775  there  were  thirty-seven  newspapers 
in  the  United  States;  one  was  published  twice  a 
week,  the  others  were  all  weeklies.  It  would  be 
an  overestimate  if  we  guessed  that  the  weekly 
circulation  of  them  all  was  forty  thousand  copies. 
One  New  York  paper  now  prints  more  than  five 
hundred  thousand  copies  every  day  of  the  three 
hundred  and  sixty-five,  and  every  copy  contains 
more  of  what  is  called  "matter,"  by  a  certain 
satire,  than  any  one  of  the  1775  journals  printed 
in  a  year.  Twenty-two  thousand  newspapers  are 
now  regularly  published  in  the  United  States. 

The  increase  in  population  in  the  same  time 
is  fourteen  fold.  The  census  of  1800  showed 
a  population  of  five  million  three  hundred 
thousand,  that  of  1900  showed  seventy-five 
million. 

These  fragmentary  statements  are  enough  to 
show  that  the  enlargement  of  the  life,  whether 
of  individual  men  or  women  or  of  the  country, 
has  advanced  in  directions  which  are  utterly 
outside  of  the  mechanism  of  statistics.  Now  one 
does  not  pretend  that  reading,  writing,  and 
arithmetic  are  the  signs  of  spiritual  life  or  moral 
victory.  But  they  are  excellent  tools  for  a  child 
of  God  to  handle,  and  we  who  are  trying  to 
study  the  century,  so  as  to  find  out  whether  the 


LITERATURE  227 

kingdom  of  God  or  the  chaos  of  the  devil  has 
made  headway,  may  pay  some  such  attention  to 
the  tools  which  men  and  women  have  had  in 
hand  as  the  century  went  by. 

Without  counting  words  or  pages,  it  is  enough 
if  you  will  try  to  read  the  publications  of  1800. 
Compare  the  exhibition  which  they  give  of  the 
real  life  of  men  and  women  against  what  we 
know  of  the  lives  of  men  and  women  now,  we 
shall  begin  to  see  how  it  is  that  the  living  men 
and  women  of  to-day  can  control  the  senseless 
giants  of  physical  power  which  in  a  hundred 
years  God  and  his  children  have  called  into 
being. 

Among  a  hundred  illustrations,  the  change  in 
literature  is  one  of  the  most  interesting.  Its 
importance  must  not  be  overrated,  but  it  is  not 
to  be  slightly  spoken  of. 

It  is,  for  instance,  easy  to  see  that  when 
ever  an  American  wanted  to  enlarge  his  life 
in  study,  he  went,  of  course,  to  England.  It 
was  precisely  as  Martial  went  from  Spain  to 
Rome. 

Washington  Irving,  as  soon  as  he  had  felt  his 
own  power,  went  in  1804  to  the  south  of  Europe. 
At  Rome  he  made  the  friendship  of  Washington 
Allston,  and  in  eighteen  months  he  had  travelled 


228        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED    YEARS 

through  the  Continent  of  Europe.  He  came 
back  to  America  and  tried  to  live  here,  but  after 
eight  years,  in  which  he  joined  in  the  Salma 
gundi  and  published  "Knickerbocker,"  he  went 
to  Europe  again.  He  then  lived  there  seventeen 
years.  Simply  this  means  that  he  could  not  live 
here.  For  a  man  like  him,  the  intellectual, 
spiritual,  aesthetic,  and  literary  life  of  England 
and  the  rest  of  Europe  offered  advantages,  not 
to  say  temptations,  which  America  could  not 
offer.  That  is  one  instance,  which  could  be 
multiplied  indefinitely,  which  shows  the  intel 
lectual  desolateness  of  our  own  country  for  the 
first  quarter  of  a  century. 

Joel  Barlow,  as  a  matter  of  course,  had  pub 
lished  his  poem  in  London.  As  late  as  1821 
Alexander  Hill  Everett  published  his  "  Europe  " 
in  London  and  reprinted  it  in  his  own  country. 
The  remark  of  Sidney  Smith's,  so  often  cited, 
"  Who  reads  an  American  book  ? "  has  been 
bitterly  resented  here.  But  it  implied  what  was 
substantially  true,  and  it  is  a  convenient  enough 
guide-post  to  show  where  the  roadway  of  that 
time  led  men.  One  has  only  to  look  at  the  early 
American  book  catalogues  and  advertisements, 
say  at  the  droll  list  which  the  great  house  of 
Harper  published  in  its  first  five  years,  to  see 


LITERATURE 


229 


that  in  truth  there  was  no  important  American 
literature. 

I  have  given  the  second  chapter  of  Volume  II. 
to  the  historians,  or  to  a  few  of  them  whom  I 


FIVE  PRESIDENTS  OF  HARVARD  COLLEGE. 
Quincy,  Everett,  Sparks,  Walker,  Felton. 

knew.     It  is  wholly  fair  to  say  that  there  is 
now  a  school  of  American  History. 

Of  the  poets  I  can  give  only  a  few  words  to  one 
little  company  of  American  poets,  who,  as  it  hap 
pened,  were  near  personal  friends  and  lived  close 
to  each  other  and  ought  to  be  spoken  of  together. 


230        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

RALPH   WALDO   EMERSON 

Ralph  Waldo  Emerson  returned  from  his  first 
visit  to  Europe  in  1833.  It  was  soon  made 
known  that  he  would  be  a  lecturer  rather  than  a 
preacher,  and,  under  the  admirable  arrangements 
of  the  old  lyceum  systems,  he  was  engaged  to 
deliver  some  lectures  in  Boston  in  the  course  of 
what  was  called  the  Useful  Knowledge  Society. 
I  heard  those  lectures,  of  which  the  one  which 
I  remember  was  that  on  Mahomet,  the  substance 
of  which  is  included  in  "  Representative  Men," 
and  it  must  have  been  at  that  time  that  I  first 
saw  Emerson  to  know  him  by  name. 

I  first  spoke  to  him  at  the  college  exhibition 
of  his  cousin  George  Samuel  Emerson,  a  young 
man  who  died  too  early  for  the  rest  of  us.  Young 
Emerson  had,  for  a  few  weeks  before  he  entered 
college,  read  some  of  his  preparatory  Greek  with 
me,  and  I  had  become  very  fond  of  him.  At 
the  junior  exhibition,  so  called,  in  Cambridge,  of 
1844,  he  had  the  first  oration  in  his  class. 
College  "  exhibitions "  are  now  unknown  in 
Cambridge,  but  then  they  made  a  pretty  part  in 
the  life  of  the  time. 

What  happened  was  this :  Three  times  a  year 
there  was  an  exhibition  —  one  in  May,  one  in 


RALPH  WALDO  EMERSON. 


RALPH   WALDO   EMERSON  233 

July,  and  one  in  October,  I  think.  The  first 
twenty-four  of  each  class  first  knew  that  they 
were  as  high  in  rank  as  this  by  the  announce 
ment  of  the  exhibition  parts.  The  first  man 
in  the  class  had  the  first  English  oration. 

On  such  occasions  the  boys,  or  men,  as  they 
called  themselves,  who  had  "  parts,"  if  they 
lived  in  Boston  or  had  any  circle  of  friends  to 
invite,  had  a  little  party  in  their  own  room. 
Such  parties  are  now  called  "  spreads,"  but  that 
word  was  then  unknown.  Eight  juniors  and 
eight  sophomores  would  speak  at  one  exhibition ; 
then,  as  the  junior  class  advanced,  eight  seniors 
and  eight  juniors  would  speak  at  the  next,  and 
again  eight  seniors  and  eight  juniors  would 
speak  at  the  third. 

Young  George  Emerson,  as  first  scholar  in  his 
class,  had  the  oration  on  this  occasion.  The 
chapel  contained  twro  or  three  hundred  of  his 
friends  and  the  friends  of  his  classmates.  After 
the  whole  was  over,  and  as  the  assembly  broke 
up,  I  crossed  the  chapel  that  I  might  speak  to 
Ralph  Waldo  Emerson,  who  stood  alone,  as  it 
happened,  under  the  gallery.  I  introduced  my 
self  to  him,  and  I  said  I  wanted  to  congratulate 
him  on  the  success  of  his  cousin.  He  said: 
"Yes,  I  did  not  know  I  had  so  fine  a  young 


234        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

cousin.  And  now,  if  something  will  fall  out 
amiss,  —  if  he  should  be  unpopular  with  his 
class,  or  if  his  father  should  fail,  or  if  some 
other  misfortune  can  befall  him,  —  all  will  be 
well."  I  was  indignant  with  what  I  called  the 
cynicism  of  his  speech.  I  thought  it  the  affec 
tation  of  the  new  philosopher  who  felt  that  he 
must  say  something  out  of  the  way  of  common 
congratulation.  But  I  learned  afterward,  what 
he  had  learned  then,  that  "  good  is  a  good 
master,  but  bad  is  a  better."  And  I  do  not 
doubt  now  that  the  remark,  which  seemed  cyni 
cal,  was  most  affectionate. 

In  the  same  college  he  had  been  "  President's 
Freshman."  This  meant  that  he  had  a  room 
assigned  to  him,  without  paying  for  it,  and  per 
haps  some  other  privileges,  in  return  for  which 
the  President  sent  him  on  his  errands.  Emer 
son's  father  and  the  President,  Dr.  Kirkland,  had 
been  neighbors  and  friends.  I  may  say  in  pass 
ing  that  the  room  is  now  occupied  by  the  bursar 
of  the  college,  and  when  we  "  get  around  to  it," 
as  our  fine  Yankee  phrase  is,  we  are  going  to 
put  up  a  bronze  to  say  that  Emerson  lived  here 
the  first  year  of  his  college  life ;  we  are  going 
to  put  up  another  at  Hollis  5,  to  say  that  he 
lived  there  when  he  was  a  sophomore,  and  yet 


RALPH   WALDO   EMERSON  235 

another  at  Hollis  15,  to  say  that  he  lived  there 
afterward. 

Mr.  Cabot's  charming  biography  gives  several 
illustrations  of  Emerson's  eagerness  to  relieve  his 
mother,  even  in  the  slightest  matters  of  expense  ; 
and  it  is  pathetic  to  see  how  large  was  his  grati 
tude  for  any  opportunity  to  render  her  any 
pecuniary  assistance.  It  was  not  many  years 
before  I  came  into  closer  personal  intimacy  with 
him  than  this  story  implies.  Beginning  with  the 
year  1848,  which  was  the  year  of  the  Irish  fam 
ine,  I  saw  and  knew  him  personally  in  ways 
which  did  me  no  end  of  good.  I  have  tried  to 
make  other  people  feel  that  he  was  a  real  man, 
who  went  and  came  with  the  rest  of  us  and  lived 
as  the  rest  of  us  live.  His  simple  accessibility  to 
all  sorts  and  conditions  of  men  belongs  to  his 
philosophy  of  life  as  born  and  nurtured  in  the 
principles  which  make  such  easy  accessibility 
possible.  Lowell  calls  him  the  New  England 
Plato,  Holmes  calls  him  the  Buddha  of  the  West 
—  good  phrases  both  of  them.  But  everybody 
must  remember  that  Plato  or  Buddha,  in  this 
case,  was  an  out-and-out  New  Englander.  He 
knew  New  England  better  than  many  of  the 
politicians  know  her.  He  knew  some  essential 
things  about  her  business  and  daily  life  which 


236        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

the  scientific  writers  on  politics  do  not  know 
to-day ;  and  he  was  never  misled  by  mediaeval 
or  European  analogies.  In  the  midst  of  the 
Irish  famine  I  told  him  that  a  poor  Irish  family 
threw  out  of  the  window  the  corn  meal  which 
we  had  sent  to  them.  And  he  stated  the  cen 
tral  principle  of  the  whole  business  when  he 
said,  "  You  should  have  sent  them  hot  cakes." 

He  would  stand  on  the  sidewalk  of  the  Con 
cord  post-office  before  the  mail  came  in  that  he 
might  talk  politics  with  the  nurserymen  or  farm 
ers.  He  worked  in  his  own  garden ;  he  set  out 
his  own  pear  trees ;  he  did  it  very  badly,  as  the 
rest  of  us  do.  But  it  pleased  him  that  he  did  not 
belong  to  the  Brahminical  caste ;  and  that  he 
was  one  of  the  Concord  people,  and  that  he 
touched  elbows  with  the  rest  of  them. 

It  would  be  ridiculous  to  call  him  a  man  of 
business.  Yet  one  remembers  that  he  sent  to 
Carlyle  the  first  money  which  Carlyle  ever  re 
ceived  for  his  books.  He  told  me  himself  that 
the  first  money  he  received  from  any  of  his  own 
books  was  that  which  Phillips  and  Sampson  paid 
him  in  the  year  1850  for  "  Representative  Men." 
Mr.  Phillips,  of  that  firm,  told  me  that  Emerson 
wrote  to  him  a  note  to  say  that  a  mistake  had 
been  made,  and  that  he  meant  that  the  proceeds 


BALPH   WALDO   EMERSON  237 

of  the  first  sale  were  to  be  spent  for  the  stereo 
type  plates  and  the  cost  of  the  impression.  Mr. 
Phillips  replied  to  him  that  that  was  provided 
for  and  that  what  he  had  received  was  the  bal 
ance  which  was  due  him.  On  this  he  came  into 
the  counting-room  of  the  young  firm  and  asked 
if  he  could  use  the  check  for  any  purpose,  as  he 
had  no  printers'  bills  to  pay  with  it.  And  Mr. 
Phillips  had  to  explain  to  him  how  to  indorse 
the  check,  which  was  made  to  his  order.  It 
was  his  first  experience  in  that  branch  of  finance. 

I  am  writing  these  lines  on  the  morning  after 
I  return  from  Hanover,  where  Dartmouth  College 
has  been  doing  itself  honor  by  celebrating  the 
hundredth  anniversary  of  Webster's  graduation 
there.  It  has  been  thought  necessary  to  justify 
Webster  for  the  "  7th  of  March  speech" ;  and  that 
justification  has  been  wrought  out  in  the  admi 
rable  address  of  Mr.  McCall.  In  that  connection 
it  is  a  little  pathetic  to  read  the  early  letter  from 
Emerson  in  which  he  speaks  with  enthusiasm  of 
the  choice  of  Webster  to  Congress  in  1822.  I 
have  cited  it  in  an  earlier  chapter  of  this  series. 

It  is  idle  to  say  here  a  word  about  the 
influence  which  Emerson's  writings  have  had 
in  this  country.  I  have  already  reminded  the 
reader  of  Gladstone's  interest  in  Emerson's  early 


238        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

address.  I  was  told  the  other  day,  by  a  man 
who  seemed  to  know,  that  of  the  authorized  edi 
tions  and  of  the  cheap  editions  published  since 
the  copyright  expired  on  his  early  books,  nearly 
five  million  copies  of  the  first  series  of  the 
Essays  have  been  printed  in  America.  I  am 
told  that  in  Scotland  they  are  found  on  almost 
every  table  of  the  workingmen.  I  do  not  sup 
pose  that  there  are  in  America  more  than  ten 
million  homes.  If  the  statement  made  to  me  is 
true,  there  is  a  copy  of  Emerson's  essays  for 
every  two  of  these  homes. 

Dean  Stanley  said  to  President  Eliot  the  day 
he  left  America  that  he  had  heard,  while  he 
was  here,  some  of  our  most  eminent  preachers, 
generally  "  evangelical "  in  denominational  posi 
tion,  but  that  it  made  no  difference  what  the 
man's  name  was,  the  sermon  was  always  by 
Ralph  Waldo  Emerson.  This  experience  of  Dean 
Stanley's  states  well  enough  the  theological 
position  of  all  the  sects  to-day.  The  immanent 
presence  of  God  here  and  now,  the  kingdom  of 
God,  is  at  hand  —  this  is  the  essence  of  all  the 
religion  of  America  at  this  hour.  Of  Emerson 
himself  it  is  interesting  to  say  that  while  he 
declined  to  fulfil  what  were  the  formal  func 
tions  of  a  clergyman,  he  always  believed  in 


RALPH   WALDO   EMERSON  239 

churches  and  church  attendance.  He  used  to 
"  go  to  meeting "  regularly  in  Concord  until 
very  nearly  the  end  of  his  life. 

I  have  one  or  two  memories  of  the  impression 
which  he  made  in  such  matters  in  the  Board  of 
Overseers  of  Harvard  College.  -  The  graduates 
of  Harvard  College  choose  their  own  Board  of 
Overseers ;  and  from  the  beginning  of  this  cus 
tom  for  two  terms  of  six  years  each  Emerson 
was  a  member  of  the  Board.  He  attended  the 
meetings  very  regularly,  and  gave  a  good  deal 
of  time  to  the  details  of  the  service.  Many 
years  before  he  died  we  had  an  enthusiast  at 
the  Board,  Dr.  Russell,  who  was  very  eager  to 
abolish  the  rules,  centuries  old,  by  which  stu 
dents  were  obliged  to  attend  chapel  every  day 
—  compulsory  chapel,  we  came  to  call  it.  Dr. 
Russell  every  year  would  introduce  a  movement 
to  make  chapel  attendance  voluntary.  It  would 
be  favorably  reported  on  by  a  committee,  and 
would  come  before  the  full  Board.  The  Board, 
however,  generally  speaking  made  up  of  men 
beyond  Dante's  middle  point  of  life,  were  not 
very  much  impressed  by  the  suggestions  of  this 
committee.  However,  there  were  plenty  of 
young  speakers  to  favor  the  motion,  until  near 
the  end  of  the  meeting  Mr.  Emerson  would  rise 


240        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED    YEARS 

and  say  substantially  this :  "  Religious  worship 
is  the  most  important  single  function  of  the 
life  of  any  people.  I  derived  more  benefit  from 
the  chapel  service  when  I  was  in  college  than 
from  any,  perhaps  from  all,  other  exercises 
which  I  attended.  When  I  am  in  Europe,  I  go 
on  every  occasion  to  join  in  the  religious  service 
of  the  people  of  the  town  in  which  I  am.  For 
this  reason,  I  should  be  sorry  to  see  the  attend 
ance  at  chapel  made  to  vary  with  the  wishes  at 
the  moment  of  the  young  men."  Perhaps  in 
writing  out  this  speech,  which  I  have  heard 
five  or  six  times,  I  make  it  longer  than  it  was. 
No  one  ever  cared  to  speak  after  this,  and  as 
long  as  he  lived  compulsory  chapel  was  main 
tained.  I  was  a  member  of  the  Board  myself 
through  all  those  years,  and  I  am  sure  that  it 
was  his  influence  which  maintained  that  custom 
so  long. 

For  myself,  I  thought  then,  and  I  think  now, 
that  attendance  at  prayers  should  be  placed  in 
our  colleges  where  elective  studies  are  placed. 
I  think  a  man  who  attends  chapel  six  times 
a  week  should  be  credited  for  three  hours  of 
public  attendance,  exactly  as  if  he  had  elected 
Greek  for  the  same  length  of  time. 


HENRY    WADSWORTH    LONGFELLOW        241 


HENRY   WADSWORTH   LONGFELLOW 


SUMNER   AND   LONGFELLOW. 

Longfellow  came  to  Cambridge  to  be  Smith 
Professor  of  Modern  Literature  in  the  spring  of 
1837. 

I  was  a  sophomore,  and  Samuel  Longfellow, 
of  my  class,  was  my  nearest  friend.  We  lived 


VOL.    II. 11 


242         MEMORIES    OF    A   HUNDRED    YEARS 

iri  close  friendship  until  he  died,  half  a  century 
after.  Our  intimacy  began  on  that  August  day 
when  we  were  examined  for  college.  I  have 
told  how  my  father  went  on  horseback  from  his 
father's  home  to  Williams  College  thirty  years 
before.  I  did  not  go  on  horseback  from  Boston 
to  Cambridge  in  August,  1835.  No !  but  we 
borrowed  the  horse  and  chaise  of  my  uncle,  who 
was  a  doctor  in  Boston  —  we  rose  at  five  — 
and  presented  ourselves,  a  trifle  late,  just  after 
six  o'clock,  at  the  college,  when  the  examination 
of  freshmen  was  beginning.  The  other  boys  of 
my  class  at  school  had  come  in  a  special  omnibus. 
But "  Uncle  Doctor  "  had  offered  us  the  chaise,  and 
we  took  it.  "  We  "  means  my  brother  and  I. 

I  tell  the  story  as  an  illustration  of  the  sim 
plicity  of  those  times.  For  at  about  the  same 
minute  arrived  at  the  steps  of  "  University  Hall " 
two  other  chaises,  both  from  Maine.  In  one  was 
Francis  Brown  Hayes,  with  his  father,  Judge 
Hayes,  from  South  Berwick.  In  the  other  was 
Samuel  Longfellow,  with  his  father,  Judge  Long 
fellow,  from  Portland.  Both  boys  had  started 
that  morning  before  sunrise  for  the  last  dozen 
miles  of  their  journey.  In  such  Spartan  manner 
did  they  prepare  for  an  examination  which 
covered  thirteen  hours  of  that  day. 


HENRY   WADSWORTH   LONGFELLOW       243 

The  accident  of  our  all  being  a  little  late 
brought  us  three  into  the  twelfth  or  last  section. 
And  so  began  an  intimate  friendship  —  as  of 
three  musketeers,  if  you  please.  Hayes  appears 
as  Hayes  St.  Leger  in  one  or  two  of  my  novels. 
He  picked  up  that  name  as  a  sort  of  college  joke. 

Samuel  Longfellow  and  I  walked  together, 
studied  together,  recited  together,  wrote  verses 
together,  and  thus,  naturally,  when  his  brother 
Henry  came  to  be  Professor,  I  came  to  know  him 
—  well  —  better  than  the  average  sophomore  did. 

The  college,  or  "  seminary,"  as  the  President 
used  to  call  it,  was  then  a  little  school  of  two 
hundred  and  fifty  boys  and  men,  whose  ages 
ranged  from  thirteen  years  to  thirty.  They 
were  taught  in  a  sort  of  high-school  fashion  by 
two  or  three  tutors,  three  or  four  instructors  in 
French,  German,  Italian,  and  Spanish,  by  two 
professors  in  Greek  and  Latin,  two  in  mathe 
matics  and  physics,  one  in  chemistry,  one  for 
rhetoric  and  English,  and  one  for  "  Moral 
Philosophy."  Into  this  snug  little  coterie  came 
Henry  Longfellow.  As  I  say,  I  had  a  special 
opportunity  to  know  him  well  from  my  friendship 
with  his  brother  Sam.  Perhaps  this  makes  me 
exaggerate  a  little  the  sort  of  breezy  life  which, 
as  I  think,  he  brought  into  the  older  company. 


244         MEMORIES    OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

If  they  really  thought  there  was  nothing  worth 
considering  beyond  the  echoes  of  the  college  bell 
—  and  most  of  them  did  think  so  —  this  hand 
some  young  Smith  Professor  undeceived  them. 


ABIEL  SMITH. 

Founder  of  the  Smith  Professorship  of  Modern  Languages 
at  Harvard  College. 

He  was  fresh  from  Europe.  He  could  talk  in 
French  with  Frenchmen,  Italian  with  Italians, 
and  German  with  Germans.  The  very  clothes 


HENRY   WADSWORTH   LONGFELLOW       245 

on  his  back  had  been  made  by  Parisian  tailors, 
the  very  tie  of  his  neckcloth  was  a  revelation  to 
the  sedateness  of  little  Cambridge.  Then  he 
was  dead  in  earnest  in  his  business,  which  was 
more  than  some  of  them  were. 

This  excellent  Abiel  Smith,. who  had  given 
new  glory  to  the  name  of  Tnbal  Cain,  had  pro 
vided  for  a  professorship  of  modern  literature. 
Men  say  it  is  the  first  such  professorship  which 
was  ever  known  in  any  university  in  the  world ; 
the  business  of  colleges  formerly  having  been  to 
praise  the  past  and  to  say  that  it  was  better  than 
the  present. 

George  Ticknor,  a  Dartmouth  graduate,  had 
been  the  first  to  fill  this  chair,  and  he  had  given 
it  distinction.  Now  Longfellow,  a  Bowdoin  grad 
uate,  had  been  called  to  take  Mr.  Ticknor's  place. 
In  the  traditions  of  the  "  seminary  "  he  was  the 
overseer  of  the  foreign  teachers  who  gave  in 
struction  in  their  several  languages,  and  he  lec 
tured  on  such  subjects  as  he  chose.  But  this 
young  Smith  Professor  pushed  all  traditions 
aside.  He  meant  to  teach  himself.  He  had  his 
own  views  about  teaching  German,  and  when 
they  told  him  there  was  no  recitation-room  for 
him,  he  said  he  would  meet  his  class  in  the  Cor 
poration  parlor  in  University  Hall.  This  was 


246        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

a  good  deal  as  if  some  enterprising  young  Gama 
liel  had  told  a  high  priest  that  he  would  meet 
his  class  in  the  Holy  of  Holies.  So  Mr.  Long 
fellow  said,  however,  and  so  it  was.  He  told  Sam 
that  he  wanted  to  teach  some  boys  German  in 
his  own  way,  and  Sam  recruited  a  dozen  of  us, 
who  used  to  sit  in  the  sacred  chairs  of  the  Cor 
poration's  guests,  around  the  sacred  table  where 
we  imagined  that  Constitution  madeira  or  sherry 
of  matchless  brands  were  served  for  the  sacred 
Seven  of  the  Corporation.  And  there,  with 
our  friendly  young  professor,  we  recited  Ger 
man  ballads  which  he  had  made  us  commit  to 
memory. 

All  this  meant  much  freer  intimacy  between 
us  and  him  than  we  had  had  with  any  of  our 
instructors  before.  You  could  take  your  consti 
tutional  walk  with  Longfellow,  you  could  play 
a  game  of  whist  in  the  evening  with  Longfellow, 
you  could  talk  with  him  with  perfect  freedom 
on  any  subject,  high  or  low,  and  he  liked  to  have 
you.  I  think  myself  that  with  his  arrival  a  new 
life  began  for  the  little  college  in  that  very  im 
portant  business  of  the  freedom  of  association 
between  the  teachers  and  the  undergraduates. 
In  the  English  Cambridge  and  Oxford,  the  theo 
retical  relation  of  the  graduates  and  the  under- 


OLIVER   WENDELL   HOLMES  247 

graduates  is  that  of  companions  in  the  same 
society  —  what  President  Eliot  calls  "this  so 
ciety  of  scholars."  Up  to  Longfellow's  time  the 
relation  at  Cambridge  had  been  simply  that  of 
teacher  and  pupil,  to  a  very  limited  extent  that 
of  master  and  servant,  as  when  Waldo  Emerson 
took  President  Kirkland's  errands  for  him.  From 
Longfellow's  day  to  this  day  I  think  the  sense 
of  companionship  has  worked  itself  into  the 
habits  and  etiquettes  of  the  college.  This  is  as 
it  should  be.  At  the  English  Cambridge  I  have 
heard  a  freshman  who  had  not  been  a  month  in 
Trinity  College  read  one  of  the  Scripture  lessons 
in  chapel.  "  He  is  one  of  us." 

OLIVER   WENDELL   HOLMES 

Holmes  was  born  in  the  parsonage  where  his 
father  lived,  the  minister  of  the  First  Church  in 
Cambridge.  The  house  was  an  old-fashioned 
relic  of  the  last  century.  He  never  forgot  that 
Ward,  the  first  commander  of  the  Americans  in 
the  siege  of  Boston,  lived  there ;  no !  nor  that 
the  detachment  which  marched  from  Cambridge 
to  fight  the  battle  of  Bunker  Hill  stood  at  atten 
tion  there,  at  sunset,  while  their  chaplain  offered 
prayer,  on  the  16th  of  June,  1775. 


248        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 


In  his  attic  room,  which  had  become  his  study 

and  workroom,  he 
wrote  the  ballad  of 
"Old  Ironsides," 
which  saved  from 
destruction  the  frig 
ate  Constitution  — 
the  pride  of  New 
England,  and  now 
the  historical  monu 
ment  of  the  short 
English  war,  as  the 
Minotaur  at  Athens 
was  of  the  days  of 
Theseus. 

I     used     to     tell 
Holmes      that      I 
thought   I    was    the 
^    first    schoolboy   who 

OLIVER  WENDELL  HOLMES. 

ever    repeated    that 
poem  upon  the  school  platform. 

"  Nail  to  the  mast  her  holy  flag, 

Set  every  tattered  sail, 
And  give  her  to  the  God  of  storms, 
The  battle  and  the  gale." 

Have  we  no  young   poet  who  will  save  the 
New  Hampshire  forests  for  us  to-day? 


OLIVER   WENDELL   HOLMES  249 

This  was  nearly  seventy  years  ago.  In  more 
than  one  spirited  poem  of  those  days  of  the  end 
of  the  twenties  and  the  beginning  of  the  thirties 
of  our  century,  Holmes  showed  what  was  in  him 
and  how  much  could  be  expected  from  him. 
Those  who  have  studied  his  poetry  would  say 
that  he  never  wrote  anything  better  than  those 
early  lyrics  which  made  men  laugh  or  cry,  as  he 
chose,  which  he  printed  when  he  was  almost  a 
boy  in  the  college  magazine.  I  think  if  a  boy  of 
twenty  did  such  work  now,  it  would  be  almost 
certain  that  he  would  at  once  be  ranked  as  a 
literary  man,  say  as  Kipling  is  to-day,  with 
hardly  a  thought  of  any  other  profession.  But 
in  1830  I  suppose  men  thought  of  literature  and 
poetry  more  as  Ben  Franklin's  father  did.  When 
Franklin  had  achieved  his  first  success  in  verse, 
still  a  boy,  his  father  told  him  that  poets  were 
always  poor,  and  that  he  had  better  not  risk 
himself  in  their  ranks.  I  think  it  is  better 
for  Holmes  and  for  the  world  that  he  had  for 
twenty  years  the  accurate  and  diligent  train 
ing  of  his  profession.  And  I  think  he  thought 
so. 

He  says  himself,  more  than  once,  that  Lowell 
dragged  him  back  into  literature,  when  Holmes 
was  more  than  forty  years  old,  and  was  a  dis- 


250        MEMORIES   OF   A  HUNDRED   YEARS 

tinguished  professor  of  anatomy.  He  had  early 
chosen  the  profession  of  medicine,  he  had  studied 
in  the  Harvard  Medical  School  and  in  Paris,  and 
he  entered  upon  the  general  practice  of  medicine 
in  Boston.  He  is  always  spoken  of  there  as  Dr. 
Holmes,  and  this  does  not  mean  that  more  than 
one  university  had  made  him  a  Doctor  of  Laws. 
Very  young  to  receive  such  an  honor,  he  was 
made  professor  of  anatomy  in  Dartmouth  Col 
lege,  and  afterwards  promoted  to  the  same  duty 
in  the  larger  Medical  College  where  he  had 
himself  studied. 

No  man  ever  won  more  delighted  interest  in 
his  pupils  than  he  did  in  his  lectures. 

The  New  England  Magazine,  of  late  years 
revived  to  a  very  brilliant  career,  was  founded  in 
1831  by  some  young  men  named  Buckingham, 
when  Holmes  was  just  beginning  on  active  life. 
He  had  begun  to  write  in  it  a  series  of  papers 
which  he  called  "  The  Autocrat  of  the  Breakfast- 
Table,"  when  the  magazine,  for  want  of  readers, 
expired.  Twenty  years  after,  when  Lowell  asked 
him  to  write  for  the  first  number  of  the  new-born 
Atlantic  Monthly  he  took  the  old  pen  and  dipped 
it  in  the  old  ink,  "  As  I  was  saying  when  you 
interrupted  me."  Those  are  the  first  words  of 
the  series  of  inimitable  essays  which,  under  differ- 


OLIVER   WENDELL   HOLMES  251 

ent  names,  he  then  continued  for  many  years, 
and  which  did  so  much  to  make  him  generally 
known. 

One  characteristic  of  those  papers,  and  of  all 
he  wrote  and  said,  is  the  range,  one  would  say 
boundless,  of  his  observation,  and  of  the  illustra 
tions  he  draws  from  it.  One  feels  as  if  he  had 
read  everything  and  remembered  everything. 
Here  are  nine  successive  titles,  which  I  have 
taken,  in  their  alphabetical  order,  from  the 
index  to  his  collected  works.  They  compass 
sea  and  land,  the  past  and  the  present :  — 

"  Agassiz." 

"  Age,  Softening  Effect  of." 

"  A  Good  Time  Coming." 

"  Air-pump." 

"America,  The  English." 

"  Analogies,  The  Power  of  Seeing." 

"  Anatomists." 

"  Anglo-Saxons,  do  they  die  out  in  America." 

"  Animal  under  It." 

The  diligence,  the  accuracy,  which  belong  to 
the  duty  and  work  of  a  great  physician  appear 
in  all  his  work.  There  is  no  splash-dash  about 
it.  He  never  tells  you  that  he  threw  it  off 
thus  and  so  (though  he  often  did),  but  he 
never  speaks  as  if  care,  and  the  "  file,"  as 


252         MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

Horace  calls  care,  were  disreputable.  I  am 
rather  glad  to  say  this  as  a  warning  to  young 
writers.  I  think  nothing  is  more  sure  to  drive 
an  office  editor  crazy  than  to  have  some  young 
enthusiast  say,  "  I  threw  this  oft'  last  night," 
or,  "  I  send  you  fresh  from  the  pen "  this  or 
that.  People  who  print  magazines  for  a  million 
readers  do  not  want  to  give  them  that  which 
has  been  thrown  off.  It  is  much  better  to 
send  them  something  which  has  seasoned  in 
the  back  of  your  table  drawer  for  one,  two, 
or  three  years. 

I  said  in  a  public  address  the  other  day  that 
I  wished  the  right  person  would  bring  together 
the  ballads  and  songs  and  scraps  from  longer 
poems  which  illustrate  the  history  of  the  coun 
try.  Really  it  is  pretty  much  all  of  the  his 
tory  of  the  country  which  people  will  need  to 
know  in  the  twenty-fifth  century.  I  was  sitting 
with  Holmes  one  day,  when,  with  a  good  deal 
of  pride,  he  took  down  his  own  Pittsfield  poem 
of  the  year  1849  and  read :  — 

"  O  gracious  Mother,  whose  benignant  breast 
Wakes  us  to  life  and  lulls  us  all  to  rest, 
How  thy  sweet  features,  kind  to  every  clime, 
Mock  with  their  smile  the  wrinkled  front  of  Time ! 
We  stain  thy  flowers  —  they  blossom  o'er  the  dead ; 
We  rend  thy  bosom,  and  it  gives  us  bread ; 


OLIVER   WENDELL   HOLMES  253 

O'er  the  red  field  that  trampling  strife  has  torn, 
Waves  the  green  plumage  of  thy  tasselled  corn ; 
Our  maddening  conflicts  scar  thy  fairest  plain, 
Still  thy  soft  answer  is  the  growing  grain. 

Yet,  0  our  Mother,  while  uncounted  charms 
Steal  round  our  hearts  in  thine  embracing  arms, 
Let  not  our  virtues  in  thy  love  decay, 
And  thy  fond  sweetness  waste  our  strength  away. 
No !  by  these  hills,  whose  banners  now  displayed 
In  blazing  cohorts  autumn  has  arrayed ; 
By  yon  twin  summits,  on  whose  splintery  crests 
The  tossing  hemlocks  hold  the  eagle's  nest ; 
By  these  fair  plains  the  mountain  circle  screens, 
And  feeds  with  streamlets  from  its  dark  ravines  — 
True  to  their  home,  these  faithful  arms  shall  toil 
To  crown  with  peace  their  own  untainted  soil ; 
And,  true  to  God,  to  Freedom,  to  Mankind, 
If  her  chained  bondage  Faction  shall  unbind, 
These  stately  forms,  that  bending  even  now 
Bowed  their  strong  manhood  to  the  humble  plough, 
Shall  rise  erect,  the  guardians  of  the  land, 
The  same  stern  iron  in  the  same  right  hand, 
Till  o'er  their  hills  the  shouts  of  triumph  run, 
The  sword  has  rescued  what  the  ploughshare  won  !  " 

"Is  not  that  good  prophecy,"  he  said,  " twelve 
years  before  the  time  ? " 

And  here  I  will  say  that  all  four  of  these  men, 
Emerson,  Holmes,  Longfellow,  and  Lowell  were 
kindness  itself  to  young  authors.  No  one  would 
believe  me  if  I  told  how  much  time  Holmes 
gave,  day  in  and  day  out,  to  answer  personally 
the  requests  of  young  people  who  submitted  to 


254        MEMORIES    OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

him  their  verses.  I  am  afraid  he  was  too  kind. 
Of  Emerson,  in  the  same  business,  it  used  to  be 
said  that  all  his  geese  were  swans.  He  was 
always  telling  you  about  some  rising  poet  who 
was  going  to  astonish  the  world.  I  ought  to  tell 
of  the  welcome  which  Longfellow  gave  to  every 
tramp  who  came  to  his  door,  if  only  the  tramp 
happened  to  speak  a  foreign  language.  And  no 
literary  wayfarer,  however  crude  and  unsophisti 
cated,  knocked  at  Holmes's  hospitable  gate  who 
was  not  made  welcome. 

JAMES   KUSSELL   LOWELL 

Lowell  was  born  within  a  mile  of  Holmes's 
birthplace,  ten  years  after  him.  He  never  re 
membered  a  time  when  he  did  not  know  him, 
and  he  was  among  the  eager  group  of  boys  who 
heard  with  delight  Holmes's  Phi  Beta  Kappa 
poem  in  1835.  Those  who  are  familiar  with 
the  writings  of  both  will  remember  the  enthu 
siasm  with  which  they  turn  back  to  their  Cam 
bridge  memories.  Lowell  would  cross-question 
the  old  negro  who  remembered  Earl  Percy's 
march  from  Cambridge  Bridge  to  Lexington  :  — 

"  Old  Joe  is  dead,  who  saw  proud  Percy  goad 
His  slow  artillery  up  the  Concord  road." 


JAMES   RUSSELL   LOWELL  255 

And  he  tells  how  that  tale  grew,  from  year  to 
year,  so  that  if  the  old  whiteheaded  negro  could 
have  lived  a  little  longer, 

"  Vanquished  Percy,  to  complete  the  tale, 
Had  hammered  stone  for  life  in  Concord  jail." 


ROBERT  CARTER,  JOHN  HOLMES,  ESTES  HOWE,  AND  JAMES 

RUSSELL  LOWELL  AT  A  GAME  OF  WHIST. 

Photographed  by  Black  in  1859. 

His  boyhood's  home  is  but  little  changed ;  — 
a  beautiful  old  house  of  the  kind  which  rich 
Tories  lived  in,  and  which  we  are  apt  in  New 
England  to  call  colonial  houses.  His  mother 
was  not  in  strong  health,  and  his  training  fell 


256        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

much  into  the  hands  of  an  older  sister,  a  charm 
ing  woman,  who  seems  to  have  known  early  that 
she  had  a  poet  to  bring  up.  At  all  events,  the 
training  was  just  such  as  one  might  be  glad  that 
a  poet  should  have.  Lowell's  love  of  nature  is 
not  in  the  least  manufactured,  and  his  acquaint 
ance  with  hang-birds  and  blue  jays  and  brown 
thrushes  is  the  friendship  of  a  man  who  has 
known  them  from  his  childhood.  So,  in  skating 
on  Fresh  Pond,  in  tracing  up  Beaver  Brook,  and 
in  the  freedom  and  ease  of  his  knowledge  of  trees 
and  flowers,  you  find,  I  do  not  say  a  country  boy, 
but  a  boy  who  has  been  brought  up  in  the  open  air. 

Of  Lowell  I  have  written  quite  at  length  in  a 
separate  volume.1  I  will  only  speak  here  of  one 
or  two  charming  personal  characteristics  to  which 
I  think  even  Mr.  Scudder,  in  his  interesting 
biography,  and  perhaps  Mr.  Howells,  in  his  charm 
ing  reminiscences,  do  not  call  quite  the  attention 
which  they  deserve.  This  is  not  the  place  for 
criticising  his  work  as  an  author. 

When  I  entered  college  in  1835,  I  shared  the 
room  Stoughton  22  with  my  brother  Nathan. 
We  lived  there  two  years.  From  the  very  be 
ginning  I  found  that  Lowell  was  almost  a  third 
partner  in  our  company.  He  was  in  and  out  at 

1  "  James  Russell  Lowell  and  his  Friends." 


HARVARD    UNIVERSITY. 


VALEDICTORY  EXERCISES  OF  THE  SENIOR  CLASS  OF 

1838, 

TUESDAY    JULY     17,    1838. 

1.     VOLUNTARY.    BY  THE  BAND. 

2.     PRAYER.     By  THS  REV.  DK.  WARE  JH. 

.     ORATION.     Bv  JAMBS  L  T.  COOLIOGE.     Boston. 

4.     POEM.     BY  JAMS*  R.  LOWKU..*     Boston. 

5.     ODE.      Bv  JOH.V  r\  \V.  WASE.     Cambridge. 

Tr».     -.iMl^ngSyM." 

We  part  for  aye, —  at  duty's  • 


THE  voice  of  joy  is  hushed  around, 
Still  is  each  heart  and  tongue ; 

LFpop  each  sad  and  thoughtful  brow 
The  garb  of  grief  is  flung. 

CHORUS. 

We  meet  to  part,  —  no  more  to  meet 
Within  these  sacred  walls, — 

No  longer  Wisdom  to  her  shrine 
Her  wayward  children  calls. 


We  break  the  pleasing  spell, 
•And  leave  to  other  feet  the  haunts  . 
.That  we  have  loved  so  well. 

CUOBl'S.  '  ',.'', 

Yet  often  when  the  soul  is  sad, 

And  worldly  ills  combine, 
Our  hearts  shall  hither  turn,  and  breathe 

One  sigh  for  "  Anld  Lang  Syne." 


We  met  as  strangers  at  the  fount  Then,  brothers,  blessed  be  your  lo 

Whence  Learning's  waters  flow,—         £^f  f_,May  Peace  forever  dwell 


And  now  we  part,  the  prayer 
Attend  the  path  we  go. 

CHORUS. 

And  on  the  clouds  that  shade  our  way, 
If  Friendship's  star  shine  clear, 

No  grief  shall  dim  a  brothel's  eye, 
No  sorrow  tempt  a  tear. 


Around  the  hearths  of  those  we  "vo  kr 
And  loved  so  long,  —  farewell. 

CHOBVS. 
Farewell,— our  latest  voice  sends  i 

A  heartfelt  wish  of  love,  — 
That  we  may  meet  again,  and  form 
One  brotherhood  above. 


6.    BENEDICTION. 


1  On  account  of  the  absence  of  the  Poet  the  Poem  will  be  omitted. 


A  PAGE  FROM  THB  VALEDICTORY  EXERCISES  OF  LOWELL'S  CLASS 
AT  HARVARD. 


JAMES   RUSSELL   LOWELL  259 

all  times  from  quarter  past  six,  when  morning 
prayers  were  over,  up  to  any  hour  you  please 
of  the  night.  His  father's  house  was,  as  I  say, 
rather  more  than  a  mile  away.  Lowell  had  a 
college  room,  but  it  was  outside  the  yard,  and  he 
used  our  room  almost  as  if  it  were  his  own,  and 
I  need  not  say  that  we  liked  to  have  him.  I 
should  say  that  he  was  at  that  time  my  brother's 
most  intimate  college  friend.  Their  tastes  were 
similar,  their  home  life  was  similar,  their  friends 
in  Boston  and  Cambridge  circles  were  the  same. 
From  that  time  until  he  died  I  was  on  intimate 
terms  with  Lowell.  After  we  all  graduated,  until 
he  married,  my  father's  house  in  Boston  was  his 
home,  somewhat  as  Stoughton  22  and  Massachu 
setts  27  had  been  in  our  college  days. 

I  came  to  know  very  soon  of  the  very  wide 
range  of  his  reading  and  of  his  diligent  interest 
in  literature.  His  acquaintance  with  modern 
literature  was  far  beyond  what  any  of  the  rest 
of  us  had,  even  in  the  little  circle  of  his  friends. 
He  was  one  of  the  charter  members  of  Alpha 
Delta  Phi,  then  a  new-born  literary  society.  It 
was  really  a  literary  society.  There  was  nobody 
among  our  teachers,  except  Longfellow,  who 
cared  a  straw  whether  we  knew  the  difference 
between  Voltaire  and  Volta,  and  we  did  our  best 


260        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

work  in  the  study  of  modern  literature,  not  for 
the  college  classes,  but  for  our  own  gratification 
or  for  Alpha  Delta. 

What  we  did  in  what  we  may  call  the  range 
of  modern  literature,  was  done  in  our  own  way. 
At  the  evening  literary  meetings,  Alpha  Delta 


JUDGE  LOWELL. 

Phi,  as  early  as  1837, 1  must  have  heard  Lowell's 
papers  on  Beaumont  and  Fletcher,  and  Massinger, 
and  the  other  English  poets,  which  afterward  he 
printed  in  more  completed  form.  When  the  time 
came  for  a  Hasty  Pudding  Poem  or  for  an  any- 


JAMES   RUSSELL   LOWELL  261 

thing-else  poem,  he  was  always,  as  a  matter  of 
course,  asked  to  write  it.  And  when  he  gradu 
ated,  we  of  that  inner  circle  knew  that  he  was 
to  be  the  poet  for  the  whole  Nation,  as  we  know 
now  that  he  has  been.  When  in  Rome,  in  1838, 
his  dear  old  father  was  told  that  his  classmates 
had  chosen  him  class  poet,  he  said :  "  Oh,  dear, 
James  promised  me  that  he  would  quit  writing 
poetry  and  would  go  to  work."  What  father  is 
there  in  a  million  who  would  not,  on  the  whole, 
be  glad  if  at  seventeen  years  of  age  his  son  had 
made  him  such  a  promise!  But  alas  and  alas! 
where  would  our  American  world  of  1902  be  if 
James  had  been  willing  to  hold  to  such  well- 
ineant  intention ! 

I  should  like  to  correct  definitely  and  squarely 
the  impression  that  he  was  a  lounger,  loafer,  or 
lazy  in  any  regard.  It  is  quite  true  that  he  was 
indifferent  to  college  rank,  and  neglected  such 
and  such  college  exercises  which  he  did  not 
fancy,  so  far  that  he  did  not  take  high  place 
in  the  rank  list ;  but  he  was  in  no  sense  lazy. 
When  he  read,  it  was  not  superficial  reading ; 
and  I  am  quite  sure  that  he  used  the  library 
when  he  was  an  undergraduate  as  very  few  of  us 
did.  In  his  after  life  he  speaks  somewhere  of 
his  working  fifteen  hours  a  day,  when  he  was  at 


262        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

the  same  time  editor  of  the  North  American 
Jftevieiv  and  of  the  Atlantic  Monthly.  At  that 
time  the  exigencies  of  the  Civil  War  called 
upon  every  man  to  do  his  best,  and  Lowell  was 
not  one  of  the  shirkers. 

Nor,  in  my  looking  back  on  Mr.  Howells's 
reminiscences  and  my  own,  and  Mr.  Scudder's 
Memoir,  and  the  two  volumes  of  Lowell's  letters 
which  Mr.  Norton  edited,  do  I  think  that  as 
much  has  been  said  as  ought  to  have  been  said 
of  his  unselfishness  and  constant  generosity.  I 
could  give  instance  on  instance,  if  it  were  best, 
of  acts  of  pecuniary  generosity  on  his  part  such 
as  Philistines  would  say  were  wrong  for  a  man 
of  his  uncertain  income.  It  seemed  enough  for 
him  to  know  that  another  man  was  in  need  for 
him  to  find  out  how  to  relieve  it.  I  have  some 
very  interesting  letters  which  show  the  tact 
with  which  his  generosity  enabled  him  to  help 
men  who  were  working  their  way  through 
college  and  whom  he  meant  to  help  somehow 
or  other. 

It  ought  to  be  said,  also,  that  his  ready  friend 
ship  for  all  sorts  and  conditions  of  men  gave  to 
him  what  he  deserved,  a  world  of  friends.  When 
my  Outlook  reminiscences  of  Lowell  were  brought 
together  in  a  volume,  I  sat  down  one  evening  and 


JAMES   RUSSELL   LOWELL  263 

wrote  the  names  of  two  hundred  and  twenty  per 
sons,  friends  of  his,  who  had  given  me  their  as 
sistance  in  the  composition.  I  do  not  believe 
there  was  ever  any  other  biography  which  was 
written  by  two  hundred  and  twenty  people.  But 
these  papers  had  been  published  in  twelve  num 
bers.  I  thought  when  I  began  that  I  had  a  good 
deal  of  material  drawn  from  old  friendship,  from 
my  brother's  correspondence  with  him,  and  from 
that  of  a  great  many  friends.  But  the  first 
number  was  hardly  published  before  I  began  to 
receive  notes,  sometimes  from  neighbors,  some 
times  from  distant  strangers,  who  sent  me  this 
anecdote  of  Lowell  or  that,  this  picture  or  that, 
or  this  or  that  bright  letter.  As  I  say,  before 
the  twelve  numbers  were  finished  there  were  in 
this  way  at  least  two  hundred  and  twenty  coad 
jutors  in  the  preparation  of  those  reminiscences. 
"  A  man  who  has  friends  should  show  himself 
friendly."  This  is  the  wise  admonition  of  the 
Book  of  Ecclesiasticus,  savoring  a  little  in 
Israelitish  fashion  of  the  weaklier  side  of 
Jacob's  character.  Certainly,  Lowell  justifies 
the  reversing  of  the  epigram.  His  life  shows 
that  the  man  who  is  friendly  is  sure  to  have 
friends. 


A  REVIEW 


CHAPTER  VII 
A   REVIEW 

HERE  is  the  conclusion  of  the  whole  matter. 
1901  found  the  United  States  another 
Nation  from  what  1800  left  it. 

In  1901  no  man  in  his  senses,  who  knew  any 
thing,  would  have  consented  to  live  as  his  grand 
father  lived  a  hundred  years  before. 

This  means  that  in  the  United  States,  as  the 
century  went  on,  God  and  Man  worked  together 
as  they  had  never  worked  before  in  the  history 
of  the  world. 

And  as  a  consequence,  man  with  man  worked 
together  as  they  had  never  done  before. 

1.  Open  promotion  for  every  child  born  into 
the  world  asserted  itself  as  never  before. 

2.  To  every  man  it  was  gradually  made  clear 
that  he  was  a  Son  of    God,  and,  if   he    chose, 
could  partake  of  the  Divine  Nature.     Men  who 
can  borrow  Omnipotence  are  not  apt  to  fail. 

The  advance  thus  made  in  the  three  Eterni 
ties,  in  Faith,  Hope,  and  Love,  accounts  for  the 

267 


268        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

advance,  which  has  been  infinite,  in  civilization. 
To  work  with  God,  to  live  in  heaven,  to  work 
together  and  not  separately,  these  laws,  or 
habits,  or  systems  —  these  are  all.  And  All  is 
enough. 

1.  Open  promotion  for  each  and  all  comes 
with  universal  suffrage  and  general  education. 

Old  John  Adams,  when  he  was  making  the 
Constitution  of  Massachusetts,  said  that  he 
meant  that  every  boy  and  girl  born  in  Massa 
chusetts  should  receive  a  liberal  education.  He 
did  not  mean  that  they  should  learn  to  read 
Latin  badly  and  write  Latin  badly.  He  did 
mean  that  they  should  speak  and  understand 
the  language  of  their  time.  "  If  they  were  dili 
gent  in  their  business,  they  would  stand  before 
kings."  And  no  matter  who  the  kings  asked  to 
meet  them,  John  Adams  meant  that  the  sons 
and  daughters  of  Massachusetts  should  be  able 
to  hold  their  own  in  the  conversation.  He 
meant  that  they  should  speak  English  and 
understand  English  as  well  as  any  man  in  any 
place.  And  he  meant  that  there  should  be  no 
"  village  Hampdens  "  or  "  inglorious  Miltons." 
He  meant  that  if  Abraham  Lincoln,  born  in  a 
log-cabin,  among  the  poorest  and,  if  you  please, 
the  meanest  of  mankind,  should  be  the  man 


A   REVIEW  269 

needed  in  the  advance  of  the  country,  he  should 
have  the  education  which  the  duty  demanded. 
The  country  has  not  gained  this  yet,  which 
John  Adams  asked  for  Massachusetts;  but  we 
are  on  the  way  toward  it.  When  you  see  a 
class  of  boys  entering  at  New  Haven,  or  a  class 
of  girls  at  Northampton,  you  see  that  the  coun 
try  insists  that,  as  God  lives,  they  shall  have 
the  best.  Open  promotion  for  all. 

2.  To  every  man  it  has  been  made  clear  that 
God  is  on  his  side,  that  God  is  his  Father,  and 
he  is  God's  child.  This  was  not  clear  in  1801. 

It  is  in  such  changes  in  the  spiritual  life  of 
men  up  to  1901  that  you  have  the  secret  of  that 
advance  in  vital  power  which  accounts  for  the 
advance  in  physical  resources.  This  accounts 
for  the  enlargement  of  all  men's  plans  and 
possibilities.  It  explains  so  far  the  reasons  why 
the  world  of  1901  is  a  better  world  to  live  in 
than  the  world  of  1801.  Even  the  faithful 
Christian  of  the  beginning  of  the  century  was 
harrowed  and  haunted  by  his  feeling  that  God 
was  angry  with  the  world  which  he  had  made, 
and  might  well  be  sorry  that  he  had  placed  any 
men  or  women  in  it.  To  speak  simply,  men 
were  tangled  up  in  every  effort  to  get  forward 
by  the  twisted  stems  of  their  fathers'  theology. 


270        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

It  was  like  a  man  stumbling  and  sometimes 
falling  in  woodland  when  he  catches  his  feet  in 
greenbrier  or  moosewood. 

I  remember  as  late  as  the  Forties,  when  I  was 
talking  with  an  enthusiastic  girl  well  up  in  her 
"  Five  Points  "  of  Calvin,  that  she  cried  out,  "  I 
trust  the  People :  the  People  is  always  right." 
I  said,  wickedly,  "  How  can  you  say  that,  when 
you  believe  that,  of  nature,  all  of  the  People 
are  totally  depraved  and  incapable  of  good  ?  " 
Poor  girl !  To  this  hour  I  remember  the  pa 
thetic  reproach  of  her  reply — her  despair  that 
the  old  theology  would  not  even  permit  her  to 
be  a  patriot. 

There  are  enough  of  the  sermons  of  1801  in 
print  for  any  one  who  chooses  to  make  a  guess 
as  to  what  the  so-called  religion  of  America  was. 
So  far  as  theology  went,  the  preachers  taught  all 
hearers  that  they  were  born  totally  depraved 
and  incapable  of  good.  But  it  is  fair  now  to 
say  that  no  pulpit  in  America  dared  to  make 
this  announcement  last  Sunday,  whatever  that 
Sunday  may  be  to  the  reader  of  these  lines. 
Again,  if  the  reader  will  struggle  with  a  hundred 
or  two  of  these  sermons  of  1801  or  thereabouts, 
he  will  find  that  the  appeal  in  them  is  an  ap 
peal  to  the  individual  sinner.  He  must  reform 


A   REVIEW  271 

his  ways.  But  at  the  present  moment  whoever 
will  read  in  the  Monday  paper,  in  New  York  or 
in  Boston  or  Chicago,  the  appeals  of  the  pnlpit 
on  the  day  before,  will  find  no  such  thing.  He 
finds  a  determination  on  the  part  of  the  preacher 
of  religion  that  the  kingdom  of  God  shall  come. 
Stated  very  simply,  it  would  be  fair  to  say 
that  the  real  religion  of  to-day  is  the  religion  of 
the  Lord's  Prayer.  On  the  other  hand,  the 
religion  which  asserted  itself  in  pulpits  a  hun 
dred  years  ago  was  the  hard  and  bitter  conclu 
sion  which  John  Calvin  had  arrived  at.  It  ought 
to  be  said  in  his  defence  that  his  conclusions  were 
arrived  at  after  a  half-century  of  war,  at  a 
period  when  it  seemed  to  men,  indeed,  as  if  the 
kingdom  of  heaven  on  earth  was  as  impossible 
as  he  thought  it  to  be.  Now  let  the  reader  try 
to  fancy  what  was  the  position  a  hundred  years 
ago,  say  of  a  chaplain  in  a  jail,  if  there  were  any 
such  person.  How  much  or  how  little  did  that 
man  believe  that  his  ministrations  with  the  pris 
oners  achieved  anything  ?  Or  imagine  yourself 
going  into  a  fight  with  Tammany,  and  having 
to  rely  upon  a  body  of  people  in  New  York  of 
whom  you  knew  that  nineteen-twentieths  were 
children  of  the  devil  who  could  not  be  regen 
erate.  If  you  really  try  to  put  yourself  in  the 


272        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

place  of  your  great-grandfather,  you  will  not 
wonder  that  the  religious  world  of  to-day  is  more 
cheerful  and  courageous  than  was  his.  Simply, 
if  you  know  you  are  a  child  of  God,  as  you  do ; 
if  you  know  that  God  woiks  in  you  when  you 
try  to  will  and  do  of  his  good  pleasure,  —  and 
this  you  do  know  now,  —  the  world  is  a  very 
different  world  from  what  it  was  when  you  were 
told  once  a  week  that  you  were  the  child  of  the 
devil. 

It  is  perhaps  true  that  a  few  old  gentlemen  try 
to  persuade  themselves  that  for  a  few  years  more 
they  may  stammer  out  some  old-fashioned  sen 
tences  which  defame  God  in  despising  man. 
But,  really,  the  world  of  the  new  century, 
whether  on  the  throne  of  the  Pope  or  in  the 
appeal  of  the  come-outer,  owns  God  as  our 
Father,  knows  he  is  at  hand,  and  asks  him  for 
everything. 

We  must  take  care,  then,  not  to  regard  the 
American  Revolution  as  simply  a  change  in  the 
political  relations  of  America.  The  war  of  the 
Revolution  was  the  doom  of  Calvinism.  Philo 
sophically  speaking,  it  would  perhaps  be  enough 
to  say  that  if  men  have  equal  rights  on  earth, 
they  must  have  equal  rights  to  heaven.  Practi 
cally  speaking,  the  same  thing  was  asserted  when 


A   REVIEW  273 

every  man  was  compelled  to  take  his  gun  on  his 
shoulder  and  go  out  and  fight  King  George.  If 
you  swept  the  Connecticut  Valley,  as  in  1777  you 
did,  of  every  boy  and  man  from  fifteen  years  of 
age  to  fifty-five,  to  go  out  "  to  fight  Burgine," 
you  could  not  say  to  those  men  and  boys,  when 
they  came  back,  that  they  were  all  incapable 
of  good  and  that  nineteen-twentieths  of  them 
would  certainly  be  damned.  Or,  if  you  said 
it,  you  almost  knew  that  they  would  not  be 
lieve  you  any  longer.1 

Without  people's  knowing  it,  therefore,  Uni 
versal  Suffrage  came  in.  The  separate  steps  to 
it  were  considered  so  unimportant  that  it  would 
be  difficult  now  to  write  the  history.  Almost 
everywhere  the  local  governments  originally  de 
manded  a  small  property  qualification  for  the 
vote,  though  from  the  beginning  no  such  qualifi 
cation  was  exacted  anywhere  in  ecclesiastical 
affairs.  But  this  demand  dropped  out,  more 
from  the  inconvenience  of  the  property  quali 
fication  than  from  any  very  eager  protest.  To 
this  hour,  the  distinction  between  a  property 

1  The  Frenchman  Chastellux  was  in  America  two  or  three 
years  with  Rochambeau.  He  says  squarely  that  in  his  frequent 
travels  back  and  forth  from  Newport  to  southern  Virginia  he 
never  met  a  man  of  fighting  age  who  had  not  served  against 
the  King.  Whether  he  wanted  to  or  not,  he  had  to  serve. 


VOL.    II.  T 


274        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

qualification  and  universal  suffrage  seems  to 
theorists  of  great  importance;  but  in  America 
practically  nine-tenths  of  the  voters  are  men 
of  property.1 

When  you  thus  create  a  pure  democracy  in 
what  you  call  affairs  of  state,  you  cannot  main 
tain  an  aristocracy  or  hierarchy  in  what  you  call 
the  affairs  of  religion. 

And  here  are  the  fundamental  causes  of  the 
bleakness  and  imbecility  of  what  people  would 
call  the  religious  literature  of  the  quarter-century 
which  follows  the  Revolution.  Preachers  cer 
tainly  felt  that  anything  they  had  to  say  on  the 
old  lines  did  not  much  interest  a  people  who 
were  discussing  the  most  important  principles 
of  social  order,  and  by  the  results  of  such  dis 
cussion  were  organizing  their  civil  communities. 

For  the  religious  revolution  implied  in  the 
changes  between  1801  and  1901,  it  is  impossi 
ble  to  give  credit  to  any  one  man,  or  any  ten 
men,  or  any  hundred  men.  The  advance  is  an 
advance  all  along  the  line.  We  owe  a  great  deal 
to  the  Methodist  revival,  which  has  met  no  check 
in  America  since  the  great  days  of  Whitefield. 

1  Thus,  at  the  Cleveland-Harrison  election  more  individual 
holders  of  property  paid  taxes  on  that  property  in  Massachu 
setts  than  voted  for  all  the  candidates  for  the  Presidency. 


A   REVIEW  275 

We  owe  a  great  deal  to  the  Swedenborgian,  or 
the  New  Church.  America  owes  a  great  deal 
to  Murray  and  Ballou  and  the  Universalists  in 
the  East,  and  to  Campbell  and  the  other  movers 
in  the  West.  The  Congregational  Church,  both 
Evangelical  and  Unitarian,  was  really  renewed 
by  such  prophets  as  Emerson  and  Channing, 
Bushnell  and  the  Beechers.  And  the  whole 
English-speaking  world  of  every  communion, 
that  of  the  Church  of  Rome  included,  has  been 
inspirited  by  James  Martineau. 

Meanwhile  the  People  governed  itself,  as  it 
should  do  in  a  democracy.  Quite  outside  the 
chatter  and  clatter  of  what  is  called  Politics, 
quite  outside  of  administrations  and  debates, 
and  bills  passed  to  the  third  reading,  and  ap 
pointments  to  office,  the  People  was  taking  care 
of  its  own  interests.  It  took  care  of  them  in 
such  gigantic  movements  as  those  which  multi 
plied  the  exports  of  cotton  from  eight  bags  in 
1784  to  two  million  and  a  half  bales  in  1850 ; 
in  such  movements  as  sent  steamboats  up  into 
the  fountain  streams  of  rivers  till  they  were 
leaving  their  passengers  and  their  freight  in 
creeks  where  they  could  not  turn  round ;  and 
in  such  enterprises  at  sea  as  the  fur  trade  of 
the  Northwest,  with  the  correlative  commerce 


276        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

of   India,   the   whale-fishery   which   "  whitened 
with  its  sails "  all  oceans.1 

The  original  and  independent  work  in  the 
realms  of  education  and  religion  was  of  equal 
importance  or  more ;  and,  .as  I  have  implied, 
there  is  no  coherent  study  of  the  century  which 
does  not  recognize  as  fundamental  the  changes 
wrought  in  the  education  of  the  hearts  and 
minds  and  souls  of  men.  An  entire  revolution 
had  been  wrought  in  such  education  by  the 
American  Revolution  and  what  followed. 

LIMITATIONS   AND   SELECTIONS 

I  have  been  frank  with  the  reader.  I  have 
invited  him  to  look  through  my  own  keyhole 
upon  this  landscape  of  a  hundred  years'  horizon. 
He  must  understand,  I  think,  that  through  one 
keyhole  you  cannot  see  the  whole. 

And  even  where  my  own  personal  recollections 
would  have  helped  me  —  or  the  stores  of  manu 
script  and  of  pamphlet  and  scrap-book  here  in 
this  house  where  I  write  —  still  it  has  been  bet 
ter  to  select  only  a  few  of  the  miracles  of  the 

1  Burke's  fine  phrase  in  which  he  says  that  the  sails  of 
the  Nantucket  fishermen  "whitened  both  oceans"  means  the 
northern  and  southern  Atlantic.  Not  many  years  after  the  first 
Nantucket  ship  passed  Cape  Horn. 


LIMITATIONS   AND    SELECTIONS  277 

century,  or  of  its  misfortunes,  or  of  the  lives  of 
a  few  of  its  charlatans  and  a  few  of  its  leaders, 
than  to.  nibble  at  every  cake  in  the  cake-box. 

I  was  once  asked  to  furnish  in  two  thousand 
words  a  sketch  of  the  literature  of  these  same 
hundred  years.  It  was  intimated  to  me  that  it 
would  be  well  if  I  gave  some  account  of  each  of 
the  leading  authors  of  the  several  years  as  they 
passed,  telling  the  reader  who  were  the  fashion 
able  authors  of  their  time.  I  had  to  begin, 
therefore,  by  classifying  North  and  South  Amer 
ica,  England,  France,  Germany,  Spain,  Italy,  and 
Russia,  more  than  eight  nations,  and  selecting 
the  new  authors  whom  people  talked  about  in 
each  year.  With  relentless  hand,  I  cut  down 
the  list  and  averaged  them  at  three  in  a 
year.  Were  it  America  in  1902,  and  I  could 
trust  the  advertising  sheets  of  the  magazines 
for  which  I  was  to  write,  there  would  have 
been  fifty  in  a  month.  Now,  3  authors  x 
by  8  nations,  x  again  by  100  years,  gave 
twenty-four  hundred  authors !  Alas !  while 
"  John  Wolfgang  von  Goethe "  could  be  ex 
pressed  in  four  words,  many  of  the  authors 
needed  more  and  few  were  satisfied  with  less. 
If,  therefore,  I  filled  the  order,  with  an  average 
of  three  words  for  each  of  my  twenty-four 


278         MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

hundred  names  —  where  were  the  criticism  and 
narration  to  come  in  ? 

Warned  by  this  experiment,  I  have  preferred 
to  take  a  few  incidents,  men,  and  eras,  and 
bravely  and  frankly  to  leave  the  rest  for  other 
pens  and  other  memories.  Hardest  trial  of  all, 
even  where  my  pen,  or  the  more  legible  hand 
writing  of  others,  has  written  out  the  chapter, 
Atropos  with  stern  scissors  has  cut  out  the  pages 
—  and  this  reader  will  never,  never  know  what 
he  has  lost !  "  No  one  knows,"  says  dear  Bishop 
Whately,  who  is,  by  the  way,  one  of  the  omitted 
heroes  of  the  century,  "what  good  things  you 
have  left  out." 

So  it  is  that  the  reader  will  find  in  these 
Memories  of  a  Century  nothing  of  the  great  epi 
demics,  but  what  is  on  this  page ;  almost  noth 
ing  of  the  French  War,  with  which  the  century 
began ;  nothing  of  the  Mexican,  or  Spanish,  or 
many  Indian  wars ;  next  to  nothing  of  the  mar 
vels  of  science,  photographs,  anaesthetics,  cor 
relation  of  forces,  and  all  that  have  sprung  from 
the  new  discoveries.  There  has  been  nothing 
of  the  great  missionary  enterprises,  nothing  of 
temperance,  of  prison  reform,  of  the  organization 
of  churches  or  of  charities.  We  discovered  a 
continent  and  we  annexed  Alaska,  of  which  there 


THE   LAST    CHAPTER  279 

is  nothing  here.  The  Kentucky  and  Virginia 
resolutions,  distracting  the  politicians  —  the 
Federalist  party  dying  —  the  "Know-Nothing" 
movement  —  all  lived  and  died.  Ah,  there  were 
many  such  all-important  catastrophes  of  which 
nothing  is  said  here.  The  treaties  of  Ghent,  of 
Paris,  of  Guadalupe-Hidalgo  and  Paris  again, 
and  so  many  other  treaties,  and  nothing  about 
them.  Cherokee  and  Seminoles,  treaties  "  which 
should  stand  as  long  as  the  rivers  run,"  nothing 
about  them !  Oregon  and  the  Columbia  River, 
and  California  and  its  gold,  Montana  and  its 
silver  !  —  nothing  !  These  and  as  many  more 
wonders,  each  of  them  worth  a  volume,  have 
not  been  noticed  here. 


THE   LAST   CHAPTER 

I  am  told  that  a  certain  arrogance  sometimes 
expresses  itself  in  my  writing.  For  this  I 
apologize.  But  I  do  riot  believe  that  I  could 
have  contrived  for  myself  a  better  ending  for 
the  marvellous  century  than  came  to  me.  I  am 
pleased  to  see  that  people  begin  to  call  our  cen 
tury  the  wonderful  century,  as  Dryden  called 
the  year  of  the  three  sixes  "  annus  mirabilis." 
All  centuries  in  their  time  have  been  called  so, 


280        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

and  this  has  the  capital  stock  of  all  the  others 
to  bank  upon  and  to  trade  with.     For 

"Nature  always  gives  us  more 
Than  all  she  ever  takes  away." 

A  year  before  the  end  there  had  been  one  of 
the  time-honored  discussions  whether  the  cen 
tury  ended  with  the  year  1899  or  not.  But 
now  almost  everybody  had  acquiesced  in  the 
proposition  that  no  possible  way  of  arranging, 
piling,  or  counting  ninety-nine  cents  made  them 
into  a  dollar.  And  it  seems  to  me  that  the 
little  world  of  literature,  certainly  the  lesser 
world  of  companionship,  accepted  the  end  of 
the  century  with  a  certain  seriousness  which  was 
encouraging.  This  was  satisfactory. 

The  French  had  invented,  many  years  before, 
the  phrase  "fin  du  siecle,"  and  applied  it  to 
everything  that  was  lawless,  or  without  prin 
ciple,  or  outside  of  conventionality  —  a  sort  of 
"  devil  take  the  hindmost "  farewell  to  the  nine 
teenth  century.  But  that  phrase  does  not  fairly 
express  the  feeling  which  thoughtful  men  and 
women  had  toward  their  old  friend.  For 
twenty  years  there  had  been  Twentieth  Century 
Clubs  among  the  people  who  tried  to  be  in  the 
advance.  The  oldest  which  I  know  is  the 


THE   LAST   CHAPTER  281 

Twentieth  Century  Club  of  Philadelphia.  In 
Boston  we  have  had  for  fourteen  years  the 
Twentieth  Century  Club  of  men  and  women, 
an  important  practical  factor  in  the  business  of 
making  people  and  things  face  to  the  front  and 
giving  them  their  marching  orders.  To  belong 
to  this  Twentieth  Century  Club  has  meant  and 
means  that  one  hopes  the  world  will  be  a  better 
world,  and  that  one  means  to  help  make  it  so. 
Among  these  clubs  there  is  nothing  of  the  "  fin 
du  siecle." 

For  myself,  I  paid  my  respects  to  the  end  of 
the  century  as  early  as  1885.  I  was  then  in  the 
city  of  Washington,  and  I  was  to  preach  on  the 
Sunday  before  Mr.  Cleveland's  inauguration.  I 
foresaw  many  of  the  evils  which  that  adminis 
tration  brought  upon  the  country.  No  prophet 
could  have  seen  them  all.  I  chose  to  preach  a 
sermon  on  the  Twentieth  Century,  and  I  printed 
it  on  my  return  to  Boston.  Does  it  perhaps 
forecast  the  altruism  of  the  new  century  if  I  say 
that  George  Littlefield,  my  personal  friend,  set 
the  types  and  locked  up  the  chases  ?  I  believe  I 
never  see  those  printed  pages  without  a  pleasant 
personal  thought  of  him  and  his  labor  of  love. 
In  that  sermon  I  laid  down  as  the  three  initial 
necessities  most  urgent  for  the  work  of  the 


282        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

new  century  with  us  :  First  the  uplift  of  the 
school  system  so  that  it  should  educate  men  and 
boys,  and  not  be  satisfied  with  their  instruction. 
Second,  the  systematic  and  intelligent  transfer, 
from  the  crowded  regions  of  the  world,  of  men 
and  women  who  should  live  in  regions  not 
crowded.  Third,  and  necessary  for  everything 
else,  the  institution  of  a  Permanent  Tribunal  for 
the  nations  of  the  world.  I  have  reprinted  the 
last  half  of  this  sermon  in  a  volume  of  notes  of 
my  own  autobiography.  I  speak  of  it  now 
because  it  is  the  first  which  I  happen  to  remem 
ber  of  the  uncounted  series  of  essays  which  bear 
its  title. 

Years  before  this  I  had  heard  Dr.  William 
Dawson,  the  President  of  McGill  University  of 
Montreal,  say  of  our  generation,  "What  will 
the  future  say  of  us  at  the  end  of  the  nineteenth 
century  ? "  He  said  that  our  men  of  science 
had  discovered  the  great  principles  of  Nature's 
action.  Their  statement  of  these  principles  was 
as  broad  and  at  the  same  time  as  definite  as 
Newton's  announcement  of  the  Law  of  Gravita 
tion.  And  then  he  said  that  these  same  men 
who  had  made  these  discoveries  were  afraid  of 
their  own  work.  They  did  not  dare  use  their 
discoveries  for  the  benefit  of  mankind !  They 


THE   LAST    CHAPTER  283 

came  to  the  edge  of  the  ocean,  as  Newton  said ; 
they  knew  the  laws  of  its  breakers  and  of  its 
ebb  and  flow,  and  they  did  not  venture  to 
launch  upon  it.  They  hardly  dared  to  paddle 
in  the  spray  on  the  beach. 

"  Why,  these  men  of  the  nineteenth  century 
were  satisfied  with  the  steam-engine,  with  the 
electric  telegraph  and  telephone,  with  the  trans 
formation  of  the  power  of  a  waterfall  into  the 
electric  current,  actually !  With  such  trifles  as 
these  they  had  done  enough;  they  hardly  began 
to  use  the  unconscious  powers  for  the  benefit  of 
mankind." 

Dawson  said  this  in  a  Phi  Beta  Kappa  oration 
at  Cambridge.  Not  many  years  after  I  heard 
our  great  master  of  engineering,  George  Mor- 
ison,  say  on  a  like  occasion  almost  the  same 
thing.  Indeed,  the  Phi  Beta  oration  always 
gives  a  good  chance  for  the  prophets. 

But  whatever  those  backward-looking  sons  of 
time  may  say  of  us,  and  whatever  Dawson  said 
they  ought  to  say,  we  have  not  been  dissatisfied 
with  the  steps  we  are  taking.  Admiral  Remey 
told  me  the  other  day  that  every  weapon  of 
offence  used  in  the  Spanish  War  in  1898  has 
been  invented  since  1865,  unless,  he  said  with 
a  smile,  one  excepts  the  dress  sword  of  the 


284        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

officer.  This  can  hardly  be  called  a  weapon  of 
offence.  It  had  won  for  itself  the  name  of  the 
"  toasting-fork  "  two  or  three  generations  before. 
As  we  approached  the  year  1892,  the  prepara 
tions  for  celebrating  the  fourth  centennial  of 
Columbus' s  discovery  waked  up  a  new  chorus 
of  speculation,  now  frivolous  and  now  serious, 
as  to  the  work  and  worth  of  the  nineteenth  cen 
tury  —  much  more  serious  than  any  which  have 
left  traces  of  the  revolutionary  period  a  hundred 
years  before. 

It  ought  to  do  us  no  harm  to  remember  that 
in  1791  and  1792  the  civilized  world,  generally 
speaking,  did  not  appreciate  America  or  the  dis 
covery  of  America  very  highly.  On  this  side 
of  the  water  nobody  had  any  doubts.  Every 
American  from  Sam  Adams  or  Thomas  Jefferson 
downward  was  sure  that  America  was  God's 
choicest  gift  to  man.  You  would  not  find  a 
woodchopper  clearing  his  homestead  by  the 
Monongahela  River,  not  six  months  from  Ger 
many  himself,  but  would  tell  the  passing  traveller 
that  America  was  the  greatest  country  in  the 
world,  and  very  likely  he  would  add  that  the 
capital  of  this  country  would  probably  be  on 
his  clearing.  Nothing  is  more  amusing  than 
the  rage  which  French  and  English  travellers 


THE   LAST   CHAPTER  285 

of  that  prehistoric  time  express  when  they  hear 
such  bragging  in  the  midst  of  squalor  and  desti 
tution.  For  on  the  other  side  of  the  ocean  none 
but  fanatics  had  any  such  notion.  There  is  a 
little  poem  in  which  Soame  Jenyns,  a  Tory  poet, 
describes  the  eagerness  with  which  the  enfran 
chised  colonists,  like  so  many  runaway  colts, 
would  come  back  to  beg  for  the  protection  of 
their  great  and  good  sovereign  George  III. 

AMEEICA 

ADDRESSED    TO    THE    REV.    DEAN    TUCKER 

"  Crown'd  be  the  man  with  lasting  praise 

Who  first  contrived  the  pin 
To  loose  mad  horses  from  the  chaise, 
And  save  the  necks  within. 

"  See  how  they  prance,  and  bound,  and  skip, 

And  all  controul  disdain  ! 
They  bid  defiance  to  the  whip, 
And  tear  the  silken  rein. 

"  Awhile  we  try  if  art  or  strength 

Are  able  to  prevail ; 
But,  hopeless,  when  we  find  at  length 
That  all  our  efforts  fail, 

"  With  ready  foot  the  spring  we  press, 

Out  jumps  the  magic  plug, 
Then,  disengag'd  from  all  distress, 
We  sit  quite  safe  and  snug. 


286        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

"  The  pampered  steeds,  their  freedom  gained, 

Run  off  full  speed  together ; 
But,  having  no  plan  ascertain'd, 
They  run  they  know  not  whither. 

"  Boys  who  love  mischief  and  a  course, 

Enjoying  the  disaster, 

Bawl,  stop  'em  !  stop  'em  !  till  they're  hoarse, 
But  mean  to  drive  them  faster. 

"  Each  claiming  now  his  nat'ral  right, 

Scorns  to  obey  his  brother ; 
So  they  proceed  to  kick  and  bite, 
And  worry  one  another. 

"  Hungry  at  last,  and  blind,  and  lame, 

Bleeding  at  nose  and  eyes ; 
By  suff'rings  grown  extremely  tame, 
And  by  experience  wise, 

"  With  bellies  full  of  liberty, 
But  void  of  oats  and  hay, 
They  both  sneak  back,  their  folly  see, 
And  run  no  more  away. 

"  Let  all  who  view  th'  instructive  scene, 

And  patronize  the  plan, 
Give  thanks  to  Glo'ster's  honest  Dean, 
For,  TUCKER,  thou'rt  the  man !  " 

The  opinion  or  the  sentiment  of  all  classes  of 
literary  men  as  to  the  .worth  of  America  was 
tested  in  1792  by  the  Academy  of  Lyons.  I 


THE   LAST   CHAPTER  287 

have  referred  to  it  in  the  first  chapter  of  these 
papers.  The  Abbe  Genty,  a  man  now  almost 
wholly  forgotten,  but  who  was  then  the  Govern 
ment's  censor  of  literature,  received  the  prize,  as 
I  have  said.  He  had  the  sense  to  foresee  the 
advantage  which  came  to  the  world  when,  as  Car- 
lyle  said,  democracy  began  its  march  around  the 
world.  But  the  other  writers,  whose  papers 
have  been  preserved,  made  but  a  poor  show. 
They  had  to  admit  that  the  wars  which  were 
born  from  American  politics  had  been  disastrous 
to  Europe  ;  they  supposed  that  some  diseases  had 
been  imported  from  America.  They  did  not  know 
enough  of  political  science  to  understand  how  it 
was  that  the  ceaseless  flow  of  gold  and  silver 
into  Europe  reduced  the  purchasing  power  of 
coin  so  that  for  three  centuries  money  debts  had 
generally  been  paid  in  a  currency  of  less  value 
than  that  of  the  time  in  which  they  were  con 
tracted.  But  they  did  understand  that  some 
thing  bothered  commerce  and  mercantile  affairs 
and  kept  them  in  wild  ferment  which  they  did 
not  comprehend.  Even  Franklin,  in  his  com 
mon-sense  way,  says  that  he  has  observed  that 
sugar  is  always  dearer  in  nations  which  have 
sugar  colonies  than  in  nations  which  have 
none. 


288        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

The  physical  goods  which  came  from  America 
were  thus  reduced  to  Jesuits'  bark  and  potatoes. 
I  think  none  of  those  competitors  for  the  Lyons 
prize  had  the  grace  to  be  thankful  to  us,  even 
for  tobacco. 

But  in  1892  all  this  was  changed.  Indeed,  as 
early  as  January,  1860,  the  porter  who  carried 
my  valise  to  the  steamship  at  Queenstown  in 
Ireland  fairly  apologized  to  me  that  he  had  not 
gone  to  America  himself  long  before.  He  wanted 
me  to  understand  that,  speaking  generally,  he 
knew  that  every  man  in  Ireland  who  was  not  an 
idiot  did  go  as  soon  as  he  could.  At  this  moment 
in  which  I  am  writing,  when  more  than  two 
thousand  people  from  Europe  arrive  here  in  every 
day,  it  is  clear  enough  that  Europe  now  has 
learned  the  lesson  of  the  danger  of  crowds  and 
the  value  of  deserts.  As  I  once  heard  William 
Evarts  say,  the  German  farmer  in  Illinois  is  no 
better  man  than  his  twin  brother  whom  he  left 
in  Prussia :  the  difference  between  the  Illinois 
farmer  and  his  brother  is  that  he  does  not  have 
to  carry  a  soldier  on  his  back. 

Yes,  there  is  a  great  advantage  in  having 
white  paper  to  write  upon,  and  every  day  of 
every  year  of  the  century  has  been  teaching  this 
to  America. 


THE   EVENING   AND    THE   MORNING        289 

THE   EVENING   AND   THE   MORNING 

As  I  have  said,  for  me,  personally,  the  century 
ended  in  a  most  dramatic  way. 

Two  centuries  before,  on  the  first  of  January, 
1701,  dear  old  Samuel  Sewall,  the  same  who 
hanged  the  witches  and  repented  of  it  so 
pathetically,  determined  that  Boston  should 
pay  its  compliment  to  the  new  century.  In 
his  diary  for  the  first  day  of  the  month  he 
says :  — 

"Jan>-  1,  1701.  Entrance  of  18th  Century. 
Just  about  Break-a-day,  Jacob  Amsden  and  3 
other  trumpeters  gave  a  Blast  with  the  Trum 
pets,  on  the  common,  near  Mr.  Alford's.  Then 
went  to  the  Green  Chamber,  and  sounded  there 
about  sunrise.  Bell-man  said  these  verses,  [My 
verses  upon  New  Century],  which  I  printed  and 
gave  them." 

Mr.  Alford's  was  the  highest  house,  in  situa 
tion,  in  Boston.  It  was  where  the  new  State 
House  yard  is,  near  Bowdoin  Street. 

I  was  familiar  with  this  interesting  memoran 
dum  of  Se wall's,  and,  as  it  proved  afterward, 
there  was  an  original  copy  of  his  broadside  in  the 
Antiquarian  Library  at  Worcester,  and  another 
in  the  Boston  Public  Library.  So,  as  the  end 


VOL.   II. IT 


290        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

of  the  century  approached,  I  sent  to  our  friend 
Mr.  Edwin  Doak  Mead,  the  President  of  the 
Twentieth  Century  Club.  Let  me  say,  in  pass 
ing,  that  Mr.  Mead  is  everybody's  friend,  and  is 
one  of  those  people  who  know  how  to  bring 
things  to  pass.  So,  when  anybody  in  Boston 
has  anything  of  public  spirit  to  be  done,  a  little 
out  of  the  common  way,  instead  of  doing  it  him 
self,  he  writes  a  note  to  Mr.  Mead  about  it,  and 
asks  him  if  he  cannot  take  care  of  it.  You 
generally  find  that  he  has  done  all  that  is  neces 
sary  before  your  note  came. 

So  I  wrote  to  Mr.  Mead.  He  agreed  with  me 
that  the  twentieth  century  ought  to  begin  as  the 
eighteenth  began,  and  Governor  Crane  agreed 
with  him.  And  Mead  reprinted  Sewall's  ode, 
and  made  the  selections  which  Moses  had  writ 
ten  for  the  purpose,  in  what  men  say  is  the  old 
est  written  poem,  written  I  do  not  know  how 
long  before  Homer.  He  arranged  with  the 
Handel  and  Haydn  people,  and  the  Cecilia  peo 
ple.  Of  course  he  lived  at  the  very  top  of 
Boston,  close  to  the  State  House,  and  there 
a  few  of  us  assembled  as  the  last  hours  of  the 
old  year  ebbed  away.  Here  is  the  programme 
which  he  printed  and  gave  them  :  • — 


THE   EVENING   AND   THE   MORNING        291 

FKOM   CENTURY   TO   CENTURY 

OBSERVANCE  OF  THE  PASSING  OF  THE  NINETEENTH 
CENTURY,  AND  THE  COMING  OF  THE  TWENTIETH  CEN 
TURY,  BY  THE  TWENTIETH  CENTURY  CLUB  AND  THE 

PUBLIC,  BEFORE    THE    STATE    HOUSE,    BOSTON. 

The  exercises  will  begin  at  quarter  of  twelve,  Monday 
night,  December  31,  1900. 

TRUMPETS,  FROM  STATE  HOUSE  BALCONY. 
HYMN,  SUNG   BY  THE  ASSEMBLY 

"  Be  thou,  0  God,  exalted  high ; 
And  as  thy  glory  fills  the  sky, 
So  let  it  be  on  earth  displayed, 
Till  thou  art  here  as  there  obeyed." 

SELECTIONS  FROM  THE  NINETIETH  PSALM,  READ  BY 
EDWARD  EVERETT  HALE. 

"  Lord,  thou  hast  been  our  dwelling-place  in  all  genera 
tions.  Before  the  mountains  were  brought  forth,  or  ever 
thou  hadst  formed  the  earth  and  the  world,  even  from 
everlasting  to  everlasting,  thou  art  God. 

"  A  thousand  years  in  thy  sight  are  but  as  yesterday 
when  it  is  past,  and  as  a  watch  in  the  night. 

"  The  days  of  our  years  are  threescore  years  and  ten ; 
and  if  by  reason  of  strength  they  be  fourscore  years,  yet 
is  their  strength  labor  and  sorrow ;  for  it  is  soon  cut  off, 
and  we  fly  away. 

"  So  teach  us  to  number  our  days  that  we  may  apply  our 
hearts  unto  wisdom. 

."  0  satisfy  us  early  with  thy  mercy,  that  we  may  rejoice 
and  be  glad  all  our  days. 

"  Let  thy  work  appear  unto  thy  servants,  and  thy  glory 
unto  their  children. 


292        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

"  And  let  the  beauty  of  the  Lord  our  God  be  upon  us ; 
and  establish  thou  the  work  of  our  hands  upon  us ;  yea, 
the  work  of  our  hands  establish  thou  it." 

SAMUEL  SEWALL'S  HYMN,  WRITTEN  FOR  THE  OBSERV 
ANCE  IN  BOSTON  OF  THE  DAWN  OF  THE  EIGHTEENTH 
CENTURY. 

Chorus 

"  Once  more,  our  God,  vouchsafe  to  shine ; 
Tame  Thou  the  rigor  of  our  clime ; 
Make  haste  with  Thy  impartial  light, 
And  terminate  this  long,  dark  night. 

"  Let  the  transplanted  English  vine 
Spread  further  still ;  still  call  it  thine. 
Prune  it  with  skill;  for  yield  it  can 
More  fruit  to  Thee,  the  Husbandman. 

"  The  false  religions  shall  decay, 
And  darkness  fly  before  bright  day ; 
Till  men  shall  God  the  Lord  adore, 
And  worship  idols  vain  no  more. 

"  So  Asia  and  Africa, 
Europa,  with  America, 
All  four,  in  consort  joined,  shall  sing 
New  songs  of  praise  to  God  our  King." 

SILENCE  UNTIL  THE  STROKE  OF  THE  MIDNIGHT  HOUK 
AND  THE  SOUND  OF  THE  TRUMPETS. 

THE  LORD'S  PRAYER,  SAID  BY  ALL  THE  PEOPLE. 
"  AMERICA,"  SUNG  BY  THE  PEOPLE. 
TRUMPETS. 


THE   EVENING   AND    THE   MORNING        293 

Here  are  my  notes  of  the  next  morning,  and 
they  shall  be  the  last  of  these  Memories  of  a 
Century :  — 

"  The  boys  of  the  Commonwealth  Club  came 
to  escort  us  to  the  State  House,  and  did. 
This  was  quite  as  well,  for  the  street  was 
crowded  with  people,  and  it  was  with  difficulty 
that  the  police  made  way  for  us  into  the  Gov 
ernor's  room  —  Mrs.  Hale,  and  E.  and  I,  and 
Mr.  and  Mrs.  Mead.  The  Governor  was  as 
pleasant  as  always.  We  waited  till  just  quar 
ter  before  twelve,  and  then  worked  our  way 
through  the  crowd,  on  the  balcony,  looking 
down  on  the  State  House  yard.  The  balcony 
had  never  seen  such  a  company  before,  for 
here  was  a  chorus  of  nearly  two  hundred 
voices,  selected  from  the  Handel  and  Haydn 
and  the  Cecilia  Society. 

"  A  perfect  sea  of  upturned  faces  was  below. 
The  spectacle  was  magnificent.  The  State  House 
yard  and  all  the  streets,  in  every  direction,  were 
crowded  as  far  as  you  could  see.  The  lights  of 
the  carriages  on  both  sides  of  the  streets  stretched 
off  into  the  dark  horizon.  The  people  were  too 
closely  crowded  to  move.  Indeed,  nobody  wanted 
to  move.  They  were  quiet,  and  absolutely  intent 


294        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

on  what  was  going  on  in  our  balcony.  For  me, 
there  were  two  men  with  cornets  on  my  right, 
with  only  the  Governor  between,  and  two  on 
my  left.  And  while  they  played,  I  could  hear 
nothing  whatever,  either  from  the  balcony  or 
from  below.  All  our  watches  were  exactly  right. 
Every  one  had  been  careful  about  that ;  and  at 
exactly  fifteen  minutes  before  twelve,  at  an 
order  from  the  chorus-master,  the  four  trumpets 
sounded.  They  played  what  in  camp  is  called 
'taps/  meaning  the  closing  strain  for  the  day. 
Old  soldiers  recognized  it  at  once  as  the  fit  close 
of  a  century.  [I  had  last  heard  it  at  Bermuda 
Hundred,  on  the  30th  of  May,  1864.] 

[Sewall,  the  old  Chief  Justice,  called  his  men 
•trumpeters,  and  we  called  ours  so.  'The  instru 
ments  were,  in  fact,  what  are  now  called  "  cor 
nets/'  But  I  believe  they  are  substantially  the 
same  as  the  trumpets  of  his  time.] 

"  The  playing  of  taps  lasted  a  few  minutes ;  I 
think  it  was  followed  by  a  little  hand  applause. 
Every  one  then  joined  in  the  first  verse  of  Old 
Hundred,  <  Be  Thou,  0  God,  Exalted  High  ! '  I 
say  every  one,  for  we  had,  as  I  say,  a  full  chorus 
of  two  hundred  voices.  But  I  do  riot  think  that 
there  was  a  general  chorus  from  below.  I  only 
heard  the  trumpets.  I  read  the  appropriate 


THE   EVENING   AND   THE   MORNING        295 

verses  from  the  Ninetieth  Psalm.  People  were 
still  as  death.  The  balcony  and  people  made  a 
good  sounding-board.  My  voice  was  all  right, 
and  I  read  very  slowly.  I  have  since  seen  people 
who  were  nearly  as  far  as  Winter  Street  who 
heard  me.  [I  have  been  asked  a  hundred  times 
if  I  used  a  megaphone.  But  here  is  simply  an 
illustration  of  the  power  of  the  human  voice  if 
the  listeners  will  keep  still.]  Then  the  chorus 
sang  two  verses  of  Se wall's  hymn.  There  was 
time  enough  and  they  sang  two  more.  Then 
another  strain  from  the  trumpets,  and  then  a 
hush,  absolute  and  very  solemn.  King's  Chapel 
bell  struck  twelve  very  slowly,  and  between  the 
strokes  our  trumpets  sounded.  There  were 
several  seconds  between  the  strokes. 

"  I  said  the  Lord's  Prayer,  and  here  I  was  con 
scious  that  other  people  joined.  The  trumpets 
played  '  America,'  and  here  people  joined  in  very 
cordially.  I  said,  '  God  bless  our  city,  our  State, 
and  our  country.'  And  this  was  to  me  as  re 
markable  as  anything  in  it  all.  People  turned 
almost  silently  to  go  home.  Indeed,  the  whole 
passage  of  the  half-hour  had  the  devout  impres 
sion  of  a  service  at  church. 

"  Looking  back  upon  it  I  cannot  help  feeling 
that  it  all  showed  curiously  well  the  serious 


296        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

foundation  of  the  life  of  our  people.  I  do  not 
think  they  thought  of  it  as  a  religious  service 
when  they  came,  but  they  all  did  when  they 
went  away." 

And  so  I  will  bid  this  faithful  reader  good-by. 
Some  library  will  preserve  this  volume,  and  it 
carries  with  it  my  charge  to  my  sons'  grandsons, 
that  in  2001  one  of  them  shall  write  his  Memo 
ries  of  the  Twentieth  Century. 


EIGHTY  YEARS 


CHAPTER  VIII 


EIGHTY   YEARS 

T^HIS  book  in  its  first  edition  was  "  noticed  " 
very  kindly  by  many  critics,  some  of  whom 
had  read  it  while  others  had  not.  One  of  the 
kindest  things 
said  of  it  was 
that  the  Index 
was  admirably 
made,  and  that 
one  name  did  not 
appear  in  that 
Index.  This  was 
the  name  of 
Edward  Everett 
Hale. 

This  friendly 
remark  was  true, 
and  it  was  by  no 
accident  that  in 
the  book  itself  I  did  not  appear  either  as  a 
hero  or  in  any  function  more  important  than 
that  of  a  spectator,  or  a  scene  shifter.  Be  it 

299 


Copyright,  185)3,  by  the  S.  S.  McClure  Co. 

EDWARD  EVERETT  HALE  AS  A  YOUNG 

MAN. 
From  an  early  portrait. 


300        MEMORIES    OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

observed  that  when  the  scene  shifter  does  his 
work  best  he  is  not  seen.  I  had  undertaken  to 
write  fourteen  chapters  of  what  I  remembered 
best  of  the  most  important  passages  in  our  own 
history  in  a  hundred  years.  I  might  have  seen 
them  or  no,  —  I  was  to  write  what  I  remem 
bered. 

Now  that  the  book  is  to  be  published  anew  in 
what  is  really  a  revised  and  corrected  edition,  I 
have  been  asked  seriously,  by  friends  and  by 
publishers,  to  add  two  or  three  chapters,  one 
especially  about  events  and  surroundings  in  my 
own  personal  life,  —  such  as  may  explain,  in  a 
fashion,  how  I  came  to  look  on  men  and  things 
through  those  particular  keyholes.  I  need  not 
say  that  it  is  a  pleasant  thing  to  do  this. 
Granted  a  willing  hearer,  most  of  us  like  to  talk 
about  our  own  old  times.  And  there  is  always 
this  advantage  in  our  modern  literature,  that  no 
compulsion  bids  the  reader  read  anything.  Even 
a  critic  or  writer  for  the  press  does  not  have  to 
read  the  book  which  he  reviews.  As  dear  Presi 
dent  Lincoln  said  so  well,  it  will  be  sure  to  be 
liked  by  those  who  like  that  sort  of  thing.  And 
there  is  no  Act  of  Parliament  about  it.  No 
man  is  compelled  to  buy  or  to  read. 

I  doubt  if  I  should  write  these  lines  as  I  do, 


EIGHTY   YEARS  301 

were  I  not  at  this  moment  under  the  charm  of 
dear  Addington  Symonds's  biography.  No !  I 
shall  not  go  so  far  as  he  does  in  telling  of  the 
dreams  of  boyhood,  —  or  even  of  the  garden 
flowers  at  Clifton.  I  should  not  write  of  them 
with  the  tender  love  which  gives  such  glamour 
to  his  book.  But  those  who  like  that  sort  of 
thing  will  like  what  I  shall  say  of  the  outside 
of  my  own  life,  —  how  it  was  that  it  became  the 
business  of  the  same  man  to  sleep  under  the  sky 
in  the  valley  of  the  Pemigewasset,  and  to  teach 
a  schoolboy  where  an  accent  falls  in  a  Greek 
verb.  For  those,  then,  who  like  that  sort  of 
thing,  the  six  thousand  words  of  this  chapter 
are  written,  in  compliance,  as  the  advertisements 
say,  with  the  requests  of  other  people.  •  The 
chapter  may  be  taken  as  a  sort  of  preface  at  the 
end. 

In  Mr.  Symonds's  recollections  of  his  child 
hood,  his  precise  wish  is  to  recall  those  mat 
ters  of  observation  or  of  reflection  which  most 
biographers  regard  as  too  trifling  to  deserve 
memorial.  I  believe  that  is  just  what  I  am  try 
ing  for  here.  The  detail  given  in  "  Who's  Who," 
or  in  other  regulation  biography,  is  given  quite 
fully  enough  in  some  papers  which  I  made 
at  Mr.  Horace  Scudder's  request,  and  printed, 


302         MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

I  do  not  say  published,  as  "A  New  England 
Boyhood."1  ' 

The  pages  in  this  reader's  hands  are  written 
with  the  hope  of  putting  a  little  flesh  and  blood 
on  that  skeleton. 

In  an  earlier  chapter  of  this  book  are  some 
references  to  my  early  boyhood.  I  am  some 
what  encouraged  when  I  recollect  that  I  cannot 
remember  Lafayette,  by  observing  that  one  of 
the  English  gentlemen  who  crossed  with  Mr. 
Moseley  the  other  day  supposed  that  Lafayette 
was  a  mayor  of  New  York  in  1825.  As  a  mat 
ter  of  the  study  of  memory,  it  seems  to  me  curi 
ous  that  while  I  remember  that  hobby-horse  with 
real  hair  for  tail  and  mane,  on  which  I  rode  in 
the  house  where  I  was  born,  I  have  no  recollec 
tion  of  what  to  a  child  must  have  been  an  im 
pressing  event  —  the  removal  of  the  hobby-horse 
and  everything  else  to  the  house  the  next  door 
but  one  on  the  corner  of  School  Street.  I  do 
remember  the  first  time  when  I  left  the  nursery 
of  my  own  motion  without  being  hindered.  I 
was  so  small  that  I  had  to  stand  on  tiptoe  to 
reach  the  brass  latch  of  the  room.  After  I  was 
a  Doctor  of  Divinity,  when  they  were  demolish- 

1  The  firm  which  bore  the  imprint  blew  up  into  thin  air  the 
day  when  the  bookbinders  delivered  the  edition. 


EIGHTY   YEARS  303 

ing  the  house,  the  builder  of  the  Parker  House 
met  ine  in  the  street  hard  by  and  asked  me  if 
there  were  no  memorials  of  the  house  which  I 
wanted.  I  told  him  I  wanted  that  latch,  and  he 
sent  a  workman  up  to  cut  out  that  part  of  the 
frame  of  the  door  on  which  the  latch  was  fas 
tened.  The  latch  is  now  just  above  my  easy  reach 
on  the  door  of  my  pamphlet  room.  I  recollect 
distinctly  the  feeling  with  which  I  prepared  a 
throne  for  the  Saviour  after  I  had  been  taught 
in  the  hymn-book  the  direction,  "  Let  every 
heart  prepare  a  throne  and  every  voice  a  song." 
I  was  well  enough  acquainted  with  his  love  to 
little  children  to  know  that  he  would  be  satis 
fied  with  the  arrangement  I  had  made  of  my 
"  high  chair,'"  a  chair  which  had  been  promoted 
to  our  play  room  after  I  no  longer  needed  it  at 
the  table.  Nobody  understands  the  mechanics 
of  memory,  but  I  agree  with  Mr.  Symonds  that 
the  more  we  can  preserve  all  such  childish  recol 
lections  the  better  eventually  for  the  science  of 
memory.  It  does  seem  to  me  curious  that  I 
recollect  little  details  about  the  colors  of  the 
ribbons  in  an  old  wooden  desk  at  school  of 
which  the  hinges  were  broken,  while  I  have  no 
recollection  whatever  of  learning  the  process 
of  reading. 


304        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

I  have  told  a  story  of  my  first  visit  to  Cape 
Cod.  I  remember  my  terror,  at  Sandwich, 
when  I  found  myself  left  alone  on  the  outside 
of  a  grist  mill,  —  a  mill  which  I  think  is  still 
standing.  My  father  and  mother  had  gone 
into  the  mill  and  I  thought  I  should  never  see 
them  again.  I  remember  the  shape  and  pat 
terns  of  the  little  glass  toys  which  they  made 
for  us  at  the  Glass  House.  I  remember  the 
names  of  Miss  Tryphena  Fessenden  and  Miss 
Tryphosa  Fessenden,  ladies  who  welcomed  us 
so  cordially  to  Sandwich.  But  I  have  not 
the  slightest  recollection  of  the  long  stage  ride, 
more  than  fifty  miles,  to  Sandwich  or  back 
again.  One  would  say  that  this  would  have 
impressed  a  child's  memory  if  anything  would. 

To  Boston  readers  to  whom  the  place  or  the 
scene  has  any  interest,  I  may  say  that  the  space 
between  Tremont  Street  and  Beacon  Street 
north  of  the  Granary  Burying  Ground  was  in 
those  early  days  of  my  boyhood  taken  up  by 
three  large  gardens  or  orchards  which  had  old 
wooden  houses  upon  them.  Mr.  William  H. 
Eliot  conceived  the  plan  of  the  Tremont  House. 
in  1828.  We  children  all  rallied  at  the  La 
fayette  window  to  see  the  corner-stone  of  the 
Tremont  House  laid.  At  about  the  same  time 


EIGHTY  YEARS  305 

the  corner-stone  of  the  Tremont  Theatre  was 
laid  on  the  spot  which  is  now  occupied  by  the 
Tremont  Temple.  The  proprietors  of  the 


NATHAN  HALE,  JR.,  AS  A  YOUNG  MAN. 

theatre  offered  one  hundred  dollars  for  an  ode 
to  be  recited  on  the  occasion  of  the  first  per 
formance.  The  friends  of  my  boyhood  know 
ine  well  enough  to  know  that  I  and  my  brother 


306         MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

Nathan  determined  to  compete,  I  being  five 
years  old  and  he  nine  or  ten.  All  that  I  recol 
lect  of  our  ode  is  that  having  described  the 
experience  of  Thespis  and  his  friends  in  acting 
in  a  cart  in  Athens  the  ode  said  that 

"  in  a  later  age 
The  actors  richer  built  them  up  a  stage/'  - 

the  joke  being  on  a  cart  and  stage.  The  work 
of  the  ode  advanced  so  far  that  our  mother  had 
to  scold  us  and  tell  us  how  absurd  it  was.  As 
matter  of  history,  I  may  say  that  the  Rev.  John 
Pierpont  received  the  prize,  and  that  his  writing 
an  ode  for  a  theatre  was  one  of  the  scandals  raked 
up  in  an  ecclesiastical  trial.  Another  of  the 
scandals  was  that  he  invented  a  kitchen  stove. 
This  was  thought  not  clerical.  A  definite 
accusation  on  these  subjects  appeared  when  an 
ecclesiastical  council  was  convened  to  try  him. 
As  I  am  on  my  confessions,  and  we  are  trying 
to  find  out  what  children  remember  and  what 
they  do  not,  I  will  say  that  I  remember  the 
details  which  I  have  spoken  of,  the  17th  of 
June,  1825,  which  happened  in  our  house.  I 
remember  in  the  other  house  waking  with  my 
brother  at  one  o'clock  in  the  morning  and 
looking  out  of  our  window  to  see  the  " stage" 


EIGHTY   YEARS  307 

which  was  to  carry  my  uncle  to  Northampton 
that  day.  I  recollect  the  parting  from  Mr. 
Judd  and  his  wife  when  they  went  as  mis 
sionaries  to  the  Sandwich  Islands  in  1828.  I 
remember  the  military  funeral  of  my  Uncle 
John  Everett  in  1826. 

In  the  "  New  England  Boyhood,"  I  have  de 
scribed  our  amusements.  Meanwhile  at,  home 
we  were  reading  everything.  Before  I  was 
eleven  I  had  read  Mungo  Park  and  Clap- 
perton,  Franklin's  Voyages  and  Parry's,  which 
were  going  on  at  that  time.  I  had  attacked 
Shakespeare  and  found  it  dull.  I  had  been 
made  to  read  more  or  less  of  Hume,  which 
I  found  equally  dull.  But  I  had  under  my 
lee  always  a  well-selected  library.  In  our  own 
private  room,  the  attic  of  the  house,  we  had 
"  The  Boy's  Own  Book,"  one  volume  of  "  Don 
Quixote,"  "  The  Treasury  of  Knowledge,"  the 
sequel  to  "  Harry  and  Lucy,"  Grimm's  "  Fairy 
Tales,"  and  immense  files  of  bound  newspapers 
to  which  we  occasionally  went  back. 

But  we  were  too  much  engaged  in  our  own 
occupations  to  read  a  great  deal  about  other 
people's.  We  had  to  invent  perpetual  motion, 
make  electrical  machines,  build  locomotives,  act 
plays,  occasionally  paint  portraits  of  the  school- 


308        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

girls  on  the  walls,  set  type,  and  print  a  weekly 
magazine. 

It  was  a  great  grief  to  me  when  my  older 
brother,  at  the  age  of  thirteen,  got  hold  of  the 
Waverley  Novels.  For  he  was  apt  then  to 
retire  to  one  of  the  lower  rooms  to  read  his 
"  Guy  Mannering  "  or  his  "  Ivanhoe,"  and  I  was 
left  alone. 

Among  other  duties  of  this  kind  which  required 
our  attention  is  one  which  has  been  of  a  certain 
service  to  me  since.  My  father  had  a  collection 
of  voyages  and  travels,  wrhich  included  a  transla 
tion  of  Krusenstern's  account  of  his  voyage  in 
the  Pacific.  This  included  a  vocabulary  of  the 
language  of  the  Marquesan  Islands.  We  thought 
it  proper  to  invent  a  grammar  for  this  language 
and  to  write  an  alphabetical  dictionary  from 
the  vocabulary.  Then,  of  course,  w,e  had  to  give 
it  a  literature  and  to  write  in  it  our  letters  to 
each  other.  Of  this  literature  all  I  now  remem 
ber  is  a  translation  in  the  Marquesan  language 
of  Coleman's  song  in  his  "  Mountaineers  "  :  — 

"  When  the  little  drummer  beats  to  bed." 

In  the  language  of  the  Nukahivas  this  ap 
pears  as :  — 

"  Womar  t'iti  enata  bacha  epoku." 


EIGHTY   YEARS  309 

When  Mr.  Herman  Melville  subsequently  pub 
lished  his  book  called  "  Typee/'  we  were  quite 
at  home  in  the  Marquesan  Islands.  I  am  afraid 
we  were  Imperialists  before  our  time.  It  was  a 
great  grief  to  us  to  read  that  when  Porter  took 
possession  of  the  islands  in  1814  the  United 
States  did  not  choose  to  keep  them.  But  all  this 
is  saying  too  much  of  boyish  enterprises. 

My  father's  was  a  newspaper  office,  and  he 
was  engaged  as  president  of  the  Boston  and 
Worcester  Railroad  in  building  that  road,  which 
was  the  beginning  of  the  western  line  of  com 
munication  for  Boston.  We  were  a  great  deal 
with  him,  and  followed  up  with  great  interest 
all  such  enterprises.  The  railroad  was  open  in 
the  year  1833,  when  I  was  eleven  years  old. 
We  boys  were  favorites  with  the  engine  drivers. 
The  rules  were  simple,  and  I  have  had  many  a 
ride  to  Newton  and  back  on  the  tender  of  the 
Meteor  engine.  Of  this  engine  I  have  published 
some  notes  in  another  chapter. 

Meanwhile  I  mulled  along  at  the  Latin  School 
as  well  as  a  boy  rather  younger  than  his  class 
could  be  expected  to,  when,  as  I  have  said,  he 
looked  upon  the  whole  matter  with  a  certain 
condescension.  I  made  friends  who  have  been 
very  dear  friends  through  life.  I  did  not  get  a 


310        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

Franklin  medal,  which  is  the  highest  honor  given 
to  such  boys.  I  was  always  marked  low  for 
declamation.  I  had  not  a  quick  verbal  memory, 
but  I  liked  my  masters  and  they  liked  me.  In  the 
last  year  of  our  life  there  the  authorities  thought 
the  strain  was  too  much  on  me,  and  I  only  went 
to  school  a  part  of  the  time.  I  remember  as  a 
consequence  of  this  that  when  we  were  to  go  to 
Cambridge  for  our  examinations  at  college,  I  had 
never  read  the  first  six  books  of  the  "  .^Eneid." 
I  wanted  to  say  to  the  examiners  that  I  had 
read  them,  and  I  spent  one  Sunday  afternoon  on 
the  ridge-pole  of  our  house  in  Central  Court,  read 
ing  them  through.  This  is  the  origin  of  the 
story  which  got  into  print  that  in  those  days  I 
read  the  "  JEneid  "  in  a  day.  The  truth  was  that 
I  could  not  have  read  the  six  books  through  in 
three  hours  if  I  had  not  been  well  drilled  on  the 
other  six. 

I  jumbled  through  college  in  a  very  happy 
way,  making  friends  who  have  been  my  friends 
all  my  life  since,  mostly,  of  course,  in  my  own 
class,  but  I  had  the  great  advantage  of  the 
personal  acquaintance  of  the  gentlemen  named 
in  other  chapters. 

I  left  college,  fortunately,  as  I  still  think,  at 
an  early  age.  This  enabled  me,  so  to  speak,  to 


EIGHTY   YEARS  311 

loaf  in  the  preparation  for  a  permanent  profes 
sion.  I  was  two  years  a  junior  master  in  the 
Boston  Latin  School.  In  these  years  I  read  quite 
faithfully  in  what  were  considered  the  books 
required  for  the  preparation  for  a  minister's  life. 
I  attended  some  lectures  at  Cambridge,  a  few  at 
Newton  Theological  School,  and  was  permitted 
to  visit  with  absolute  freedom  in  the  house  of 
our  minister,  Dr.  Samuel  Kirkland  Lothrop.  In 
this  period  I  spent  the  greater  part  of  a  year 
with  my  father  as  his  secretary,  at  the  time 
when  we  were  in  Pennsylvania  together,  confer 
ring  with  the  leaders  of  that  state  about  the 
measures  to  be  taken  for  the  redemption  of  their 
foreign  credit.  I  have  often  said  that  the  best 
training  I  ever  got  for  my  profession  was  in  that 
year  of  business  life,  when  my  dealings  were  with 
editors  and  lawyers  and  masters  of  transporta 
tion,  when  I  was  studying  wire  ropes,  and  in 
clined  planes,  and  traction  on  canals.  To  this 
hour,  when  I  am  asked  about  the  education  for 
the  ministry,  I  say  that  Jesus  began  to  preach 
when,  as  is  supposed,  he  was  about  thirty  years 
old.  But  for  me,  I  preached  my  first  sermon  as 
early  as  1841  in  the  Warren  Street  Chapel,  in 
Boston.  I  was  licensed  to  preach  in  October, 
1842,  and  preached  my  second  sermon  in  Newark, 


312        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

New  Jersey.  But  all  this  was  more  or  less 
sporadic;  and  my  first  long  engagement  as  a 
preacher  was  in  the  city  of  Washington,  begin 
ning  with  the  last  Sunday  in  September,  1844, 
and  ending  in  February,  1845.  The  Northern 
party  had  been  defeated  in  the  election  of  Mr. 
Polk,  and  I  was  just  fool  enough  to  refuse  to 
stay  in  Washington  to  see  his  inauguration.  I 
had  about  a  hundred  dollars  at  that  time,  and  I 
was  tempted  to  buy  a  horse,  and  ride  North  to 
my  home  in  Boston.  I  have  been  sorry  ever 
since  that  I  did  not  do  it.  For  I  have  learned 
that  no  man  knows  America  unless  he  has  seen 
it  with  his  eyes.  But  the  mud  was  very  deep, 
and  I  resisted  the  temptation  for  so  Quixotic  an 
enterprise  —  the  more  so,  I  think,  because  I  had 
no  Don  Quixote  to  go  with  me. 

We  had  just  annexed  Texas  after  a  debate  of 
which  I  heard  a  great  deal  in  Congress.  I 
thought  that  the  remedy  for  the  danger  to  the 
nation  was  in  a  large  emigration  from  the  North 
into  Texas.  In  the  chapter  above,  on  the  annex 
ation  of  Texas,  I  have  said  something  of  my  first 
pamphlet  and  my  wish  to  emigrate  at  that 
time.  (Footnote,  page  152.) 

After  this  winter's  life  in  Washington  I  spent 
the  greater  part  of  a  year  in  Worcester,  Massa- 


EIGHTY   YEARS 


313 


chusetts.    There  were  many  reasons  why  I  should 
be  happy  in  that  place,  and  I  accepted  a  call  to 


EDWARD  EVERETT  HALE  IN  1846. 
From  the  painting  by  Richard  Hinsdele. 

be  the  first  minister  of  a  new  church.  I  was 
ordained  there  on  the  29th  of  April,  1846,  and 
began  a  very  happy  experience  of  life  which 


314        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

lasted  ten  years.  I  recollect  that  somebody  said 
at  the  time  of  my  ordination  that  there  was  not 
a  gray  hair  in  the  congregation,  and  I  believe 
this  was  true.  It  was  not  true  a  week  after, 
when  persons  who  had  not  cared  to  join  in  the 
initial  movement  but  had  always  intended  to 
join,  became  members.  It  was  a  small  congrega 
tion  at  that  time,  of  people  who  were  very  much 
interested  in  it.  As  we  used  to  say,  there  was 
no  dust  in  the  pulpit  cushions.  There  were  no 
traditions  to  be  maintained.  We  were  simply 
people  who  had  tumbled  together  in  a  real  wish 
to  set  things  forward,  and  who  did  not  believe  in 
any  of  the  mechanical  theology  of  the  centuries 
before  us.  I  was  soon  asked  to  serve  on  the 
School  Committee,  and  I  did  so.  But  I  said 
what  was  true,  that  there  were  plenty  of  young 
lawyers  and  young  doctors  who  would  be  glad  to 
serve  on  the  School  Committee,  and  that  I  had 
rather  serve  on  the  Board  of  Overseers  of  the 
Poor.  The  managers  of  such  things  took  me  at 
my  word,  and  I  was  an  Overseer  of  the  Poor  at 
Worcester  for  two  years.  That  was  about  the 
period  of  the  Irish  Famine,  and  we  were  all  up 
to  our  eyes  in  making  arrangements  for  the 
incursion  of  Irish  emigrants. 

Looking  back  upon  the  half-century  in  which 


EIGHTY   YEARS  315 

I  have  had  more  or  less  public  duty,  such  as  falls 
upon  a  minister  in  New  England,  I  am  tempted 
to  note  the  entire  change  for  the  whole  country 
which  has  been  wrought  by  the  European  emi 
gration  to  America  of  those  years.  As  late  as 
when  I  was  in  college  people  began  to  mark  the 
annoyances  which  were  caused  by  the  arrival  of 
Irishmen  who  were,  so  to  speak,  imported  for  the 
purpose  of  working  on  the  railroads  then  in  prog 
ress.  I  have  been  told,  and  I  believe,  that  in 
1821,  when  the  Western  Avenue  and  Mill  Dam 
were  built  in  Boston,  Irish  emigrants  were  sent 
for  and,  so  to  speak,  imported  to  work  in  that  en 
terprise.  This  is  the  earliest  instance  I  know  of 
such  organized  emigration.  Every  man  who 
thought  himself  sensible  tried  to  turn  the  tide 
back,  precisely  as  Mrs.  Partington  tried  to  sweep 
back  the  English  Channel  with  her  broom  in 
Sydney  Smith's  parable.  It  was  just  as  the 
Federal  leaders  of  New  England  in  1804  wished 
that  they  could  check  the  emigration  to  the  West. 
There  was  a  society  founded  in  Boston  for  the 
purpose  of  turning  emigrants  back,  which  sent 
circulars  out  to  Ireland  in  that  view,  to  warn 
people  against  coming.  In  this  society  a  near 
friend  of  mine  was  agent.  But  you  cannot 
make  a  nation  like  ours,  in  which  one  man  shall 


316        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

have  the  same  right  before  the  law  as  another, 
and  then  expect  to  keep  out  from  it  the  people 
of  other  countries  where  the  laboring  man  does 
not  have  the  same  rights  as  another.  As  soon 
as  the  laboring  men  find  out  that  your  nation 
exists,  they  will  come  to  it.  On  this  principle 
simply  has  followed  the  wave  of  foreign  emigra 
tion  which  now  brings  to  us  a  million  people  every 
year  from  Europe  and  Asia. 

I  was  myself  already  settled  in  parish  work. 
Great  stimulus  was  given  to  the  emigration  from 
Ireland  by  the  "  Irish  Famine."  We  had  com 
mittees,  even  in  towns  as  small  as  Worcester,  for 
the  purpose  of  raising  money  for  provisions  to  be 
sent  out  to  Ireland,  and  the  distress  there  was 
materially  alleviated  by  such  supplies.  By  one  of 
those  charming  bits  of  poetry  which  always  take 
hold  of  the  fancy  of  the  nation  in  great  exigen 
cies,  it  proved  that  the  Jamestown  and  the  Mace 
donian,  ships  from  the  United  States  Navy,  could 
be  sent  with  supplies.  Captain  Robert  Bennett 
Forbes,  the  brother  of  John  Murray  Forbes,  offered 
to  take  charge  of  the  Jamestown  and  surrounded 
himself  with  other  fine  seamen,  some  of  whom 
were  men  of  the  highest  position  and  social  rank. 
One  of  the  edifying  incidents  which  show  na 
tional  character  appeared  when  the  citizens  of 


EIGHTY   YEARS 


317 


Cork  in  Ireland,  on  the  arrival  of  this  vessel  with 
food  supplies,  invited  them  to  a  public  dinner. 
Probably  not  one  of  them  saw  the  humor  of  the 
incident. 

Speaking  to  a  large  audience   of  young  men 
the  other  day,  I 
told  them  that  I 
wished    some    of 
them   would   un 
dertake  the  seri 
ous  study  of  the 
moral  and  spirit 
ual  effect  which 
what    are    called 
mechanical    or 
physical    inven 
tions    have    pro 
duced    upon    the 
world  in  the  last 
hundred    years. 
The  Power  which 
makes  for  right 
eousness  has  chosen  to  use  the  material  things 
and  what  are  called  discoveries  and  inventions 
in  physics    for   the    great   moral    and    spiritual 
purposes  of  the  century.     Things  which  perish 
in  the  using  have  contributed  under  His  will 


CHURCH  AT  WORCESTER,  MASS.,  AT 
WHICH  DR.  HALE  OFFICIATED  IN  1846. 


318        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

to  the  infinite  enlargement  of  thought  and  of 
endeavor  in  men's  relations  with  each  other. 
Religion  is  on  a  higher  plane  because  of  physi 
cal  invention  and  discovery.  Whoever  writes 
these  essays  will  have  to  put  in  a  sub-chapter 
to  show  how  our  export  of  cotton  to  England 
and  France  contributed  directly  to  the  back 
ward  flow  of  that  wave  which  brings  us  now 
this  million  people  a  year  as  an  addition  to 
our  population.  See  how  this  accounts  for  the 
moral  sociological  changes  which  are  central 
in  the  history  of  America  for  a  hundred  years. 
When  Eli  Whitney  created  the  cotton  crop  of 
the  Southern  states  the  exports  to  the  other 
parts  of  the  world  were  so  small  that  in  Jay's 
Treaty  of  1794  they  were  not  so  much  as 
alluded  to.  The  export  of  cotton  from  the 
beginning  had  been  hardly  a  hundred  thou 
sand  bales  in  ten  years.  In  four  years  before 
1830  the  export  was  three  hundred  thousand 
bales.  By  1850  the  average  was  between  one 
and  two  hundred  thousand  bales  every  year. 
The  average  weight  of  a  bale  is  called  four  hun 
dred  and  forty  pounds. 

As  has  been  said,  in  1821  we  began  to  "im 
port  "  Irishmen  for  work  on  public  improvements. 
But  how  was  this  emigration  possible  ?  It  was 


EIGHTY   YEARS  319 

possible  because  we  were  sending  out  ships 
larger  and  larger  every  year,  which,  had  high 
between-decks  adapted  specially  to  the  piling  in 
of  these  bales  of  cotton.  When  these  between- 
decks  were  relieved  of  their  burden,  we  had 
nothing  to  bring  back  excepting  the  manufac 
tured  goods  of  England  which  took  but  little 
space.  It  seems  queer  now  to  say  that  we 
ballasted  our  ships  with  iron  rails  from  the 
English  mines.  One  little  step  enabled  the 
owners  of  these  ships  to  arrange  their  lofty 
between-decks  with  berths  for  passengers,  the 
carriage  of  whom  really  cost  them  absolutely 
nothing.  For  the  ships  had  to  come  back. 
There  was  no  cargo  to  fill  these  great  saloons 
which  had  for  size  no  rival  even  in  the  palaces 
of  the  emperors.  The  ship-owners  at  once 
"  caught  on,"  to  use  our  own  excellent  lan 
guage.  They  fitted  up  the  great  cotton  ships 
with  berths  and  tables  and  table  furniture,  and 
were  able  to  bring  over  as  many  passengers  as 
the  law  would  permit  them.  The  legislators 
of  both  countries  were  prompt  to  regulate  this 
commerce  in  men  and  women ;  and  to  this  hour 
the  laws  for  the  health  of  passengers  during 
their  residence  on  shipboard  are  in  most  cases 
better  than  the  laws  of  the  American  cities 


320        MEMORIES   OF   A  HUNDRED   YEARS 

for  the  health  of  such  people  after  they  have 
arrived  on  land.  Horace's  wails  regarding  the 
sea  and  its  dangers  are  so  far  contradicted. 

The  particular  matter  which  occupied  me  was 
the  arrangement  by  which  those  persons  who 
became  paupers  after  their  arrival  here  should  be 
cared  for,  not  by  the  small  towns  where  they 
might  happen  to  live,  but  under  a  general  sys 
tem  by  the  authorities  of  the  state  in  Massachu 
setts.  I  was  told  at  the  time,  and  I  should  be 
glad  to  think  it  is  true,  that  our  admirable  state 
establishments  at  Tewksbury,  at  Rainsford  Island, 
at  Bridgewater,  and  at  Monson  owe  their  exist 
ence  to  a  series  of  publications  which  I  made 
when  the  Irish  Famine  first  directed  our  atten 
tion  to  the  subject. 

In  1854,  as  the  reader  of  Chapter  IY  in  this 
volume  knows,  what  used  to  be  called  the 
Nebraska  Bill  passed  the  Congress.  Up  till  that 
time  the  adjustment  made  by  the  Missouri  Com 
promise  in  1820  had  made  freedom  the  future 
law  of  all  states  which  might  be  created  north  of 
the  parallel  of  the  southern  line  of  Missouri. 
That  is  to  say,  the  North  gave  way  so  far 
as  to  say  Missouri  may  be  a  slave  state  but  there 
shall  be  no  other  slave  states  north  of  this 
parallel.  If  the  Southern  leaders  had  been  will- 


EIGHTY   YEARS  321 

ing  to  hold  by  this  "  compromise/'  the  Civil 
War  could  have  been  long  postponed.  But,  as  I 
have  said  in  Chapter  IV,  with  sublime  audacity 
they  attempted  to  overthrow  this  "compromise." 


ELI  THAYER. 


With  equal  audacity,  and  with  pluck  and  deci 
sion  which  cannot  be  praised  too  much,  Eli 
Thayer  organized  the  Massachusetts  Emigrant 
Aid  Company.  As  I  have  said  in  that  chapter, 
I  was  alive  to  the  principles  of  his  plans ;  I 


322        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

reported  every  day  to  him,  and  I  was  his  Man 
Friday  for  that  summer.  We  lived  near  each 
other  in  Worcester,  and  could  confer  with  each 
other  easily.  In  that  summer  I  wrote  the  his 
tory  of  Kansas  and  Nebraska,  really  before  there 
was  a  white  man  in  that  territory  who  had  any 
business  there  unless  he  were  a  soldier.  By  this 
I  mean  that  the  United  States'  surveyors  had 
not  gone  in  there,  and  any  " squatter"  could 
have  been  ejected.  But  in  fact  there  were  no 
"  squatters." 

In  that  summer,  however,  as  has  been  said, 
our  first  colonists  went  out,  and  at  the  moment 
when  I  write  I  am  receiving  from  Nebraska 
and  Kansas  the  accounts  of  their  half-century 
celebrations,  —  celebrations  in  which,  I  am  sorry 
to  say,  I  am  not  able  to  share  personally.  I 
was  the  junior  member  of  the  New  England 
Emigrant  Aid  Company  which  had  the  man 
agement  of  our  Northern  emigration,  and  I  am 
president  of  that  Company  to-day.  We  have 
a  claim  against  the  United  States  government 
for  the  destruction  by  its  officers  of  a  hotel 
which  we  owned  in  Lawrence.  The  Company 
maintains  its  existence  simply  for  the  purpose  of 
transferring  that  claim  to  the  Lawrence  Uni 
versity,  an  admirable  institution  which  is  main- 


EIGHTY   YEARS 


323 


tained  in  the  city  which  we  founded.  The 
name  Lawrence  was  given  that  city  by  the  set 
tlers  in  memory  of  Mr.  Amos  Lawrence,  the 
first  treasurer  of  our  Company. 

When  in  1856  I  was  asked  to  remove  from 
Worcester  to  Boston,  and  did  so,  this  business  of 
emigration  to  the  West 
occupied  much  of  my 
time  and  thought.  I 
have  devoted  the  fourth 
chapter  of  this  volume 
in  the  first  edition  to 
some  account  of  it,  and 
I  do  not  dare  enlarge 
that  account  here.  In 
the  year  1879  I  went  to 
Lawrence  with  my  daugh 
ter  to  their  quarter-cen 
tennial  celebration.  It  was  a  most  interesting 
occasion.  We  had  still  living  many  of  the  old 
war  horses  of  that  time,  and  we  fought  over 
those  battles  with  great  satisfaction.  The  Civil 
War  was  over.  Kansas  had  the  honor  that  in 
the  Civil  War  a  larger  proportion  of  her  young 
men  served  in  the  United  States  Army  than 
came  to  it  from  any  other  state  in  the  Union. 
Alas  and  alas,  her  young  men  had  been  trained 


AMOS  LAWRENCE. 


324        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

to  war  during  the  years  between  1854  and  I860, 
and  of  course  in  an  emigrant  population  like 
theirs  there  were  more  young  men  than  in  the 
average  proportion  of  any  other  state  excepting 
Nebraska. 

I  went  to  Boston,  however,  with  the  fixed  de 
termination  to  be  the  minister  of  the  South  Con 
gregational  Church  and  nothing  else.  I  did  my 
best  to  hold  to  that  decision.  But  when  Surnter 
was  fired  upon,  on  the  12th  of  April,  1861,  all 
this  was  changed.  I  had  already  enlisted  as  a 
recruit  in  Salignac's  drill  corps.  It  was  evident 
to  all  men  and  women,  to  all  boys  and  girls,  that 
the  preservation  of  the  nation  in  its  integrity 
was  the  ruling  duty  of  the  hour.  I  gave  myself 
to  that  duty  in  every  way  which  seemed  to  me 
feasible.  One  or  two  details  of  it  have  been 
printed  in  the  earlier  editions  of  this  book.  The 
ladies  of  my  church  were  active  and  patriotic 
from  the  beginning,  and  the  Sanitary  Commis 
sion  had  no  more  efficient  auxiliary  than  their 
society. 

In  Chapter  V  some  account  has  been  given  of 
the  work  of  the  church  as  a  church  in  such  exi 
gencies.  Perhaps  I  may  be  permitted  to  say 
that  at  that  time  I  formed  the  habits  and  as 
sumed  the  duties  which  have  since  mixed  me  up 


EIGHTY   YEARS  325 

a  good  deal  with  public  offices  in  the  state  of 
Massachusetts,  with  duties  such  as  I  should  not 
have  been  called  to  perform  had  it  not  been 
for  those  experiences  of  the  Civil  War.  Among 
such  duties  is  the  charge  which  I  now  hold, 
since  my  appointment,  by  the  unanimous  vote 
of  the  Senate  of  the  United  States,  to  be  their 
Chaplain. 


THE   HISTORY   OF  MAGAZINES 


CHAPTER   IX 
THE   HISTORY    OF   MAGAZINES 

I  AM  told  that  the  preceding  chapters  would 
be  more  intelligible  if  I  say  something  about 
what  I  may  call  my  little  share  in  the  develop 
ment  of  American  literature  during  the  years  to 
which  I  have  referred.  I  will  try  to  do  this  in 
the  briefest  possible  way,  for  it  is  really  not 
of  any  concern,  except  to  my  children  and  theirs, 
how  or  why  I  found  myself  among  magazine 
writers.  But  the  development  of  the  American 
magazine  is  curious  and  important. 

My  uncles  Edward  Everett  and  Alexander 
Everett  were  born  to  be  literary  men.  They 
had  distinguished  themselves  at  Harvard  Col 
lege.  t  They  had  early  gone  to  Europe.  And 
they  knew  how  utterly  ignorant  America  at 
large  was  with  regard  to  the  Continent  of 
Europe ;  they  knew  also  that  the  American 
reader  in  general  was  wrong  in  his  estimate 
of  England,  as,  by  the  way,  he  is  now. 

To  this  hour,  I  rate  Mr.  Alexander  Everett's 
two  books  called  "  Europe  "  and  "  America  "  as 

329 


330        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

among  the  important  books  for  a  young  Ameri 
can  to  read.  1  cannot  make  anybody  else  think 
so,  but  I  like  to  say  it  here.  Both  of  these 
young  gentlemen  fell  in  with  Mr.  Tudor' s 
plans  for  the  North  American  Revieiv.  The 
war  with  England  had  brought  about  a  set 
of  complications  which  induced  their  brother, 
Oliver  Everett,  to  abandon  the  hardware  busi 
ness  in  which  he  was  engaged,  and  he  estab 
lished  a  new  publishing  firm  in  Boston  which 
printed  and  published  the  North  American 
Review.  From  the  index  I  find  that  Edward 
Everett  contributed  an  article  on  the  life  of 
Heine  to  the  second  volume  of  the  North 
American.  This  must  have  been  in  1816.  Alex 
ander  Everett,  in  Europe  at  the  time,  contrib 
uted  an  article  on  Peace  Societies  as  early  as 
the  sixth  volume.  The  North  American  in  its 
earlier  volumes  was  much  more  of  what  we  call 
a  magazine  than  it  has  been  since.  I  remember 
a  translation  from  Wilhelm  Meister  by  Mr.  Fran 
cis  Galley  Gray  into  English  verse.  In  the  year 
I  was  born,  1822,  Oliver  Everett  published  what 
I  think  was  the  first  reprint  of  an  English  maga 
zine  in  America.  It  was  printed  by  my  father, 
who  was  the  first  person  in  New  England,  I 
think,  to  print  by  what  was  called  a  power  press. 


THE   HISTORY   OF   MAGAZINES  331 

Of  this  I  am  sure,  that  he  was  the  first  person 
in  Boston  to  print  by  the  new  tide  power  which 
had  been  created  by  the  "Western  Avenue"  and 
the  "  Mill  Dam."  Being  about  half  a  century 
in  advance  of  his  age  in  that  as  in  most  every 
thing  else,  my  father  had  used  power  presses,  as 
they  were  called,  to  be  run  by  the  waterfall  be 
tween  the  "  full  basin  "  and  the  "  empty  basin  " 
of  the  "Back  Bay"  in  Boston.  "  Full  basin  "  and 
"  empty  basin  "  are  now  unintelligible  words  to 
the  Boston  reader.  All  of  the  "empty  basin  "  is 
now  occupied  by  elegant  dwellings  and  by  the 
Public  Garden ;  most  of  the  "  full  basin "  is 
occupied  by  what  is  known  as  the  Fenway  Park, 
and  by  a  bad  smelling  pond.  Mrs.  Gardner's 
Museum  is  on  the  southwest  side  of  the  "  full 
basin."  The  waterfall  between  the  "  full  basin  " 
and  the  "  empty  basin  "  drove  my  father's  power 
presses.  They  were  the  invention  of  his  friend, 
Daniel  Treadwell,  then  a  novelty;  and  the  pub 
lication  of  a  reprint  of  the  New  Monthly  Maga 
zine  was  among  their  earliest  achievements  in 
Boston. 

This  Monthly  Magazine  had  obtained  a  pecul 
iar  distinction  in  England  under  the  editorial 
charge  of  the  poet,  Thomas  Campbell,  who  held 
that  charge  for  ten  years.  With  its  fourth 


332        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

volume  Mr.  Oliver  Everett  began  to  reprint  it 
in  America. 

Oliver  Everett  assumed  the  publication  of  the 
North  American  Review,  and  on  the  return  of 
his  brother  Edward  from  Europe,  in  1819,  he 
became  its  editor,  and  continued  as  such  till 
1824.  In  an  article  in  "  Appleton's  Cyclope 
dia/'  written  I  think  by  myself,  but  "  inspired  " 
by  him,  he  says  "his  object  in  assuming  the 
charge  of  this  periodical  was  to  imbue  it  with 
a  thoroughly  national  spirit,  and  in  pursuance 
of  it  he  contributed  a  series  of  articles  in  which 
this  country  was  defended  with  great  spirit 
against  the  shallow  and  flippant  attacks  of  sev 
eral  foreign  travellers."  The  date  of  Sydney 
Smith's  celebrated  epigram,  "  who  reads  an 
American  book,  or  goes  to  an  American  play, 
or  looks  at  an  American  picture  or  statue  ?  "  is 
1820.  Nine  years  afterward,  when  Mr.  Alex 
ander  Everett  returned  from  Spain  in  1829,  he 
assumed  the  ownership  and  charge  of  the  North 
American.  I  forget  which  of  them  said  to  me 
once,  that  if  there  had  been  no  North  American 
Review  he  and  my  father  and  I  would  have 
been  rich  men. 

The  compensations  of  magazines  were  not  then 
as  large  as  they  are  now.  For  magazine  adver- 


THE   HISTORY   OF   MAGAZINES  333 

tising,  which  had  been  invented  in  England,  had 
not  dawned  on  the  American  rnind.  The  Neiv 
England  Magazine,  founded  by  the  Buckingham 
Brothers  in  1831,  was  not  successful  pecuniarily, 
though  it  was  very  clever.  Mr.  Edward  Everett's 
paper,  "  A  Humorous  Account  of  an  invasion  of 
Kose  Bugs,"  is  as  good  as  anything  ever  printed 
in  an  American  magazine.  It  was  in  the  New 
England  Magazine  that  Dr.  Holmes,  then  a 
youngster,  wrote  the  first  "  Autocrat  of  the  Break 
fast  Table."  When  the  Atlantic  was  started, 
years  after,  the  series  as  now  known  begins  with 
the  words,  "  As  I  was  saying  when  you  inter 
rupted  me,"  which  refers  back  twenty-six  years. 

Somewhere  along  in  these  years  the  Knicker 
bocker  began  in  New  York.  When  I  was  in  col 
lege  we  always  had  it  at  the  Alpha  Delta  reading 
room  by  way  of  encouraging  American  litera 
ture.  But  what  we  read  were  the  reprints  of 
Blackwood  and  the  Diiblm  University,  and  what 
were  called  "  The  Four  Quarterlies."  I  remem 
ber  the  injunction  given  by  some  college  presi 
dent  which  we  used  to  copy  into  our  note-books 
began  with  the  words,  "  Read  all  Reviews." 

In  Philadelphia  they  made  the  great  discovery 
that  by  subsoiling  a  very  little,  and  taking  into 
their  confidence  the  general  reader  of  America, 


334        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 


they  could  obtain  a  much  larger  circulation 
than  the  dainty  literary  journals  were  receiving. 
Graham's  Magazine,  Godeys  Lady's  Book,  and 
afterward,  the  Southern  Literary  Messenger,  were 
the  first  magazines  whose  editors  found  out  that 

while  there  were 
not  many  liter 
ary  men  and 
women  in  Amer 
ica,  there  were 
many  readers. 
Our  admirable 
friend  Mr.  Alden 
laid  down  the 
rule  for  me  half 
a  century  after 
ward,  when  he 
said  in  every 
number  of  a 
magazine  there 
must  be  one  love 
story.  I  do  not  know  whether  it  is  right  for  me 
to  print  this  axiom  for  the  information  of  the  gen 
eral  reader  of  to-day,  but  it  is  undoubtedly  true. 
In  Boston  a  young  firm  of  men  named  Brad 
bury  and  Soden  conceived  the  idea  of  the  Boston 
Miscellany  of  Literature  and  Fashion.  Observe 


GEORGE  REX  GRAHAM,  EDITOR  OF 
"  GRAHAM'S  MAGAZINE." 


THE   HISTORY   OF   MAGAZINES  335 

the  Fashion.  This  was  in  1840.  This  meant 
that  in  conjunction  with  literary  work  of  the 
first  rank,  they  meant  to  publish  a  fashion  plate 
to  please  what  in  the  language  of  the  day  we 
called  "  the  factory  girls."  When  they  an 
nounced  that  of  the  first  number  of  the  Miscel 
lany  of  Literature  and  Fashion  one  thousand 
copies  were  sold  in  the  city  of  Lowell,  they 
made  public  the  great  secret  of  the  modern 
American  magazine.  You  were  to  have  as 
readers  not  only  the  Brahmin  class,  which  Mr. 
Arnold  calls  "  the  margin,"  but  the  great  rank 
and  file  of  people  in  America  who  wanted  to  be 
instructed  and  amused. 

The  type  and  make-up  of  the  Boston  Miscellany 
of  Literature  and  Fashion  were  based  upon  the 
contemporary  publications  of  Edward  Moxom  in 
London. 

Bradbury  and  Soden  had  the  wit  to  come  to 
my  father  to  ask  him  who  had  better  edit  this 
magazine.  He  advised  them  to  ask  my  brother 
Nathan.  He  was  at  that  time  twenty-one 
years  of  age,  a  graduate  of  Harvard,  had  spent 
some  time  at  the  Law  School,  and  was  at  that 
moment  engaged  in  the  triangulation  of  the 
Green  Mountains  in  Berkshire.  They  had  the 
sense  to  engage  this  young  law  student  as  edi- 


336        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

tor  of  the  Boston  Miscellany.  For  one  year  he 
occupied  that  position,  and  I  will  say  very 
frankly  that  no  better  magazine  has  been 
printed  in  America  from  that  day  to  this.  He 
had  the  editorial  help  of  the  Everetts,  of  Haw 
thorne,  Nathaniel  P.  Willis,  William  Story, 
James  Lowell,  my  mother,  the  Matthews  set, 
the  Duyckinck  and  Jones  set  in  New  York; 
and  he  published  articles  by  Thomas  Parsons, 
Mrs.  Browning,  Mrs.  Kirkland,  Nathaniel  P. 
Willis,  and  other  writers  who  wrote  as  well  as 
these  I  have  named,  though  they  were  not  so 
well  known.  Among  the  other  pleasant  recol 
lections  of  it  is  my  impression  that  the  Miscel 
lany  printed  for  the  first  time  Miss  Barrett's 
"  Cry  of  the  Children  "  from  her  own  manuscript. 
I  hope  I  need  not  say  that  our  whole  family 
enlisted  in  this  enterprise.  I  find  that  my  first 
article  in  it,  which  is  not  a  bad  one,  is  the  story 
called  "The  Salamander/'  It  may  be  worth 
while  to  print  the  table  of  contents  of  the  first 
number.  Translation  from  the  Talmud  by  my 
mother,  a  sonnet  by  James  Lowell,  an  article 
on  American  Sculptors  by  Edward  Everett,  a 
poem  by  William  Story,  a  translation  from 
Caroline  Pichler  by  my  mother  (observe  this 
is  the  love  story),  a  poem  by  James  Lowell,  this 


THE    HISTORY   OF   MAGAZINES  337 

Salamander  story  by  myself,  a  story  by  my 
brother,  a  new  song  by  Barry  Cornwall  with 
the  music  by  Webb.  On  the  whole  this  would 
be  thought  a  good  selling  "  table  of  contents/' 
even  in  our  times. 

But  the  Miscellany,  alas,  did  not  pay  because, 
as  I  have  said,  magazine  advertising  had  not 
been  invented.  Also  the  publishers  distrusted 
the  literary  part  of  the  venture,  while  my 
brother  and  his  friends  disliked  the  fashion 
part,  and  he  resigned  at  the  end  of  December. 
Afterwards  Henry  W.  Tuckerman  had  the  edit 
ing  of  the  magazine,  but  after  three  or  four 
numbers  it  died.  It  had  lost  Lowell,  who  was 
the  best  contributor.  He  with  his  friend  Mr. 
Robert  Carter  started  the  Pioneer,  often  al 
luded  to  in  his  life.  I  think,  however,  the 
Pioneer  printed  but  three  numbers.  That  was 
in  New  York.  It  was  in  those  days  that  Willis, 
of  whom  we  thought  so  much,  said  of  Lowell 
that  a  man  of  genius  who  is  merely  a  man 
of  genius  is  a  very  unfit  editor  for  a  periodi 
cal.  Mr.  Mead  has  written  a  charming  paper 
on  the  Pioneer  for  the  New  England  Magazine. 

As  I  have  said  in  speaking  of  the  childhood 
of  all  of  us,  the  editing  weekly  journals  for 
the  family  began  at  a  very  early  period.  Mine 


338        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

was  called  the  Public  Informer.  I  am  afraid 
that  the  unfortunate  name  was  given  us  by 
some  wicked  uncle.  In  my  own  time  the  Pub 
lic  Informer  gave  way  to  the  Fly,  which  my 
brother  and  I  printed  with  our  own  hands  in 
the  years  1834  and  1835.  All  that  I  remember 
of  the  Fly  is  its  obituary  of  Lafayette.  La 
fayette  died  on  the  19th  day  of  May,  1834 ;  and 
we  stopped  the  press  to  announce  his  death. 
Unfortunately  we  were  at  the  last  gasp  in  our 
type  for  the  letters  u  and  n,  which  were  used 
as  substitutes  for  each  other  by  proper  standing 
on  the  head  of  the  one  or  the  other.  Our  obitu 
ary  of  Lafayette  called  him  good  and  noble  La 
fayette,  and  said  that  his  death  was  caused  by  a 
cold.  It  should  have  said  "  influenza."  But  as 
the  reader  will  observe,  that  word  requires  three 
of  the  n-u  combination,  so  that  we  substituted 
cold  for  it,  though  we  were  well  aware  of  the 
bathos  of  the  paragraph.  Unfortunately,  when 
we  went  to  press,  the  one  remaining  n  dropped 
out  of  the  form,  so  that  Lafayette  on  our  files 
goes  down  to  history  as  "  oble "  instead  of 
"  noble." 

I  remember  that  I  wrote  for  the  Advertiser  its 
notice  of  the  first  number  of  Grahams  Maga 
zine.  Many  of  our  most  distinguished  authors 


THE   HISTORY   OF    MAGAZINES 


339 


afterward   blessed    Graham    for   the    magazine, 
which  continued  for  many  years. 

Sartains  Magazine,  with  the  advantage  of  his 
own  mezzotints,  continued  with  a  series  of  issues 
in  Philadelphia.  The  habit  then  existed  which 
crops  out  now 
sometimes  of 
offering  prizes 
for  magazine 
articles.  I  am 
apt  to  think 
that  the  offer 
of  such  a  pre 
mium  called 
out  a  good 
deal  of  ability 
which  would 
otherwise  have 
lain  latent.  It 
seems  to  me 
that  was  not 
a  bad  way  to 
get  that  "  stuff,"  as  one  of  the  most  eminent 
American  publishers  used  to  call  it.  To  me  per 
sonally  the  custom  was  of  avail ;  for  in  the  days 
when  I  was  bringing  up  a  family  upon  the 
modest  salary  paid  by  a  newly  established 


JOHN  SARTAIN,  EDITOR  OF  "  SARTAIN'S 
MAGAZINE." 


340        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

parish,  the  prize  of  one  hundred  dollars  from 
Sartain  or  some  other  adventurous  publisher, 
was  a  very  nice  addition  on  the  credit  side.  I 
will  say  in  passing  to  young  authors  that  I  was 
never  particular  about  the  subject  proposed,  if 
the  publisher  wanted  to  pay  me  a  hundred  dol 
lars.  Whether  it  were  a  life  of  Nero,  or  whether 
it  were  the  abolition  of  slavery,  it  was  fish  to 
my  net.  Such  is  the  habit  generated  in  a  news 
paper  office. 

From  1840  for  three  years  my  father  had 
published  the  Monthly  Chronicle,  a  sort  of  cross 
between  the  historical  magazine  and  the  weekly 
newspaper.  It  is  a  great  pity  that  the  public 
did  not  see  how  good  it  was  and  continue  it  to 
this  hour.  I  was,  so  to  speak,  the  office  editor 
of  the  Chronicle,  and  I  wrote  on  whatever  sub 
ject  I  was  asked  to  write  about.  The  subjects 
ranged,  with  audacity  of  youth,  from  a  discus 
sion  of  the  Afghanistan  War  in  the  East  to  the 
invention  of  the  electrotype,  or  the  progress  of 
Secondary  Education  under  Louis  Philippe. 

The  Atlantic  Monthly  owes  its  birth  to  Moses 
Dresser  Phillips,  who  was  the  partner  of  Charles 
Sampson.  They  were  two  young  men  who  suc 
ceeded  in  waking  up  for  the  time  the  moribund 
book  business  of  Boston  and  giving  it  new  life. 


THE    HISTORY   OF   MAGAZINES  341 

Phillips  describes  himself  admirably  in  a  little 
speech  which   he    made   at   a   dinner   party  in 


MOSES  DRESSER  PHILLIPS. 
Reproduced  by  permission  of  Houghton,  Miffliu  &  Co. 

which  he  inaugurated  the  Atlantic  Monthly.     He 
had  for  his  guests  Ralph  Waldo  Emerson,  Henry 


342        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

W.  Longfellow,  James  Lowell,  Lothrop  Motley, 
Oliver  Wendell  Holmes,  Elliot  Cabot,  and  Mr. 
Underwood.  He  characterizes  Underwood  as 
his  "literary  man."  The  speech  he  made  was 
this :  — 

"  Mr.  Cabot  is  much  wiser  than  I  am.  Dr. 
Holmes  can  write  funnier  verses  than  I  can. 
Mr.  Longfellow  writes  better  poetry  than  I, 
Mr.  Motley  can  write  history  better  than  I.  Mr. 
Emerson  is  a  philosopher  and  I  am  not.  Mr. 
Lowell  knows  more  of  the  old  poets  than  I. 
But  none  of  you  knows  the  American  people 
as  well  as  I  do." 

This  was  the  exact  truth.  After  a  little, 
Lowell  became  the  working  editor  of  the  Atlan 
tic,  and  in  spite  of  Mr.  Willis's  forecast  fifteen 
years  before,  proved  himself  to  be  one  of  the 
best  editors  who  has  ever  administered  the 
affairs  of  a  magazine.  Lowell  and  Phillips  and 
I  were  intimate,  and  it  was  natural  that  I 
should  write  for  the  Atlantic.  My  first  article 
was  the  "  Dot  and  Line  Alphabet "  in  the  second 
volume.  The  name  "  Atlantic  "  meant  some 
thing  which  had  to  do  with  both  shores  of  that 
ocean.  But  the  original  picture  on  the  cover 
was  of  John  Winthrop,  a  Massachusetts  celebrity. 
As  soon  as  war  broke  out,  however,  this  was 


THE   HISTORY   OF   MAGAZINES  343 

exchanged  for  the  American  flag.     There  is  now 
no  picture  on  the  cover. 

When  in  1857  Dr.  Hedge  and  his  friends 
took  the  charge  of  the  Christian  Examiner,  he 
honored  me  by  asking  me  to  be  with  Rev. 
Joseph  Henry  Allen  the  working  editors  in  the 
renaissance  of  that  somewhat  remarkable  jour 
nal.  We  were  youngsters,  delighted  to  serve 
under  a  philosopher  so  eminent  as  he.  We 
used  to  call  him  the  Chief,  and  do  what  he  told 
us  to  do.  My  connection  with  this  journal  led 
to  my  editing  Old  and  New.  I  still  think  the 
theory  of  Old  and  New  was  good.  As  William 
Weeden  said  of  it,  it  would  have  succeeded 
had  there  been  anybody  connected  with  it  who 
wanted  to  make  money.  The  theory  is  that 
of  the  French  Revue  des  Deux  Mondes,  that  a 
journal  which  discusses  the  very  gravest  points 
in  theology  or  in  politics  shall  at  the  same  time 
and  in  the  same  cover  have  some  story  or  other 
article  which  a  boy  or  girl  of  fifteen  will  like 
to  read.  In  other  words,  your  magazine  should 
not  be  a  magazine  for  experts  or  leaders  only, 
nor  should  it  be  a  magazine  for  young  men  and 
maidens  only.  It  should  be  both.  The  Revue 
des  Deux  Mondes  is  the  only  journal  in  the 
world  known  to  me  which  really  fulfils  this 


344         MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

requisition.  And  thus  it  happens,  as  an  accom 
plished  lady  once  said  to  me,  that  the  Revue  des 
Deux  Mondes  is  in  itself  a  liberal  education. 

These  details,  many  of  them  petty  in  them 
selves,  must  be  excused  because  they  bear  upon 
the  most  important  literary  revolution  of  the 
last  half -century  in  America.  The  publishing 
of  magazines  has  become  a  separate  business,  — 
industry,  shall  I  say  ?  And  there  is  not  the 
least  danger  now  that  any  flower  will  blush 
unseen  among  the  seedlings  planted  by  the 
American  public  schools.  We  not  only  have 
the  largest  constituency  of  readers,  but  we  have 
the  largest  constituency  of  writers.  Some  of 
them  write  well  and  some  of  them  write  ill, 
but  those  who  write  well  receive  their  reward 
and  those  who  write  ill  receive  theirs. 


NOW  AND   THEN 


CHAPTER   X 
NOW   AND   THEN 

I  HAVE  been  trying  to  select  some  one  sub 
ject  a  little  limited,  by  which  I  might 
present  to  the  "  rising  generation  "  the  contrast 
between  the  middle  of  the  late  century  and  this 
year  1904.  In  one  or  two  of  the  early  chapters 
of  these  memories  I  have  tried  to  give  an  index 
to  the  change  in  daily  life  in  a  general  way,  but 
I  believe  that  for  the  younger  set  of  readers  I 
shall  do  better  if  I  describe  one  of  the  contrasts 
more  sharply.  And  we  will  take  a  journey  from 
Boston  to  Washington  in  1844,  as  compared  with 
a  journey  between  the  same  points  in  1904.  As 

"  Good  Sir  Walter,  save  him  God, 
No  braver  e'er  to  battle  trod," 

said  on  a  celebrated  occasion,  "  'Tis  sixty  years 


since." 


By  way  of  introduction,  let  the  young  reader 
understand  that  I  was  to  go  from  my  home  in 
Massachusetts  to  meet  an  engagement  to  preach 
in  the  Unitarian  church  in  the  city  of  Washing 
ton.  I  had  also  engaged  with  my  friend  William 

347 


348         MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

Francis  Charming  to  go  with  him  to  Schoharie 
Cave.  This  is  an  interesting  limestone  cave  in 
the  state  of  New  York  which  nobody  visits,  be 
cause  it  is  not  far  enough  oft',  but  which  is  very 
well  worth  a  visit  from  any  of  the  people  of 
sense  who  may  read  these  lines.  Also,  I  went 


CAPITOL,  WASHINGTON,  1844. 

to  see  Trenton  Falls,  of  which  much  the  same 
thing  might  be  said.  What  I  do  want  is  that 
the  young  reader  shall  understand  the  simplicity 
of  the  travelling  arrangements  of  that  day. 

Eh  Uen,  tres  lien  !  The  journey  from  Massa 
chusetts  to  Washington  is  in  my  journal  book 
of  faded  ink.  Let  us  dip  into  it. 


NOW   AND   THEN  349 

(Let  me  say  in  passing  that  for  sixty  years 
of  life,  between  that  time  and  this,  I  have 
found  old  John  Adams's  remark  about  diaries 
to  be  singularly  true.  He  says  that  when  there 
is  nothing  of  importance  to  write  about  you 
have  time  enough  to  write  in  your  diary,  but 
that  when  events  become  interesting  you  have 
no  time  to  write,  and  that  the  diary,  therefore, 
tells  nothing.  This  is  true,  not  only  of  John 
Adams's  diaries,  but  of  mine.) 

September  16,  1844.  Up  at  half -past  five. 
We  breakfasted  early,  bade  good-by  to  each 
other.  We  drove  over  to  the  Beverly  depot 
and  we  bade  them  good-by  there.  We  went 
to  Boston.  At  home  after  the  greetings  I  ran 
my  eye  over  my  Egyptian  article  and  sent  it 
to  Mr.  Gannett.1  I  packed  my  trunk  and  my 
box  of  books,  etc.  (I  needed  no  heavy  bag 
gage.  I  had  boxed  up  my  little  store  of  ser 
mons,  my  steady  supply  of  shirts  and  other 
clothing  with  one  or  two  of  those  handbooks 
which  one  always  needs  for  a  winter,  and  had 
sent  them  on  board  the  schooner  Mozart  for 
Alexandria.  Not  to  speak  of  the  Mozart  again, 
I  will  say  that  after  one  month  I  received  this 
box  in  Washington.) 

1  It  never  got  printed. 


350        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

After  dinner  I  wrote  a  note  to  Mr.  Dillaway 
which  I  had  not  finished  when  Mr.  and  Mrs. 
Lothrop  appeared  on  a  call.  Then  a  while  of 
good-bys  and  I  left  for  the  cars. 

We  arrived  at  Springfield  at  8.30  P.M.,  and 
we  went  to  the  American  House.  (The  reader 
will  observe  that  between  Beverly  and  Spring 
field  I  had  made  one  change  of  cars,  and  that 
at  the  end  of  fifteen  hours  I  had  come  as  far  as 
Springfield.) 

Tuesday,  September  17,  1844.  —  Another  hot 
day.  Up  at  5.30.  We  took  the  western  train 
at  7.  We  were  detained  an  hour  at  Pittsfield 
by  the  lateness  of  the  down  train.  (Observe 
that  the  western  railroad  was  still  a  single  track, 
and  note  what  follows  on  this  delay. 

Also  that  in  all  these  incidents  it  was  neces 
sary  to  cross  from  one  side  of  a  city  to  another. 
Governor  Lincoln's  remark  was  still  regarded 
as  truth  in  these  inland  towns.  He  said,  "I 
never  heard  that  it  did  a  town  any  good  to 
have  a  bird  fly  over  it."  Accordingly,  at  that 
time  you  went  from  Albany  to  Buffalo  by  taking 
one  road  from  Albany  to  Schenectady,  then 
rode  across  the  town  and  took  the  road  for 
Utica.  You  then  rode  across  that  town  and 
took  the  road  for  Syracuse.  At  Rochester  you 


NOW   AND    THEN  351 

crossed  the  town  again  and  took  the  road  for 
Buffalo.  A  syndicate,  as  disbelievers  call  it,  is 
a  one  made  out  of  many  in  such  affairs.) 

At  Albany  we  hurried  at  once  to  the  Schenec- 
tady  cars,  having  satisfied  ourselves  that  that 
would  be  our  best  way,  and  found  they  had  been 
gone  fifteen  minutes.  Another  train  started  at 
2,  however,  and  we  dined  at  the  Railroad  House 
and  took  that.  (Schenectady,  observe.  We  have 
taken  two  days,  and  done  our  best,  and  have 
arrived  as  far  as  Schenectady.)  At  Schenectady 
we  hired  a  wagon  and  driver  to  bring  us  over  to 
Howe's  Cave,  at  Schoharie,  twenty-two  miles. 
In  making  this  little  arrangement  I  made  a 
little  call  at  Judge  Tomlinson's. 

We  have  had  a  very  pleasant  ride,  starting  at 
10.15  and  arriving  here  at  7.30.  The  latter 
part  of  the  way  we  have  had  in  sight  the  north 
ern  end  of  the  Catskill  range,  under  the  light  of 
a  beautiful  sunset,  which  was  followed  by  one 
hour's  evening  ride  through  woods  and  over 
hills,  lighted  occasionally  by  fires  in  the  wood 
land.  We  are  to  enter  the  cave  to-morrow  at  7 
o'clock. 

Wednesday,  September  18, 1844. — We  were  up 
before  6  o'clock  and  breakfasted  at  6.30  o'clock, 
but  by  dint  of  several  delays  in  preparation  and 


352        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

a  walk  of  half  a  mile  to  the  cave  entrance,  we 
did  not  get  started  within  till  9  o'clock.  We 
left  the  cave  at  about  3.30  wet,  dirty,  and  tired, 
and  in  the  cave  dresses  walked  down  to  the  in 
different  tavern.  We  had  agreed  last  night  to 
start  at  7  rather  than  at  4,  that  Howe,  the  dis- 


RAILWAY  TRAIN  IN  THE  MOHAWK  VALLEY,  1844. 

coverer  and  proprietor  of  the  cave,  might  go  with 
us.  He  had  receded,  however,  and  left  us  to  the 
mercies  of  a  guide.  We  went  farther  than  any 
body  had  ever  gone  before  day  before  yesterday, 
and  indeed  our  guide,  who  was  at  the  head  of  our 
column,  succeeded  in  getting  into  a  cavity  where 
they  had  not  been. 


NOW   AND   THEN  353 

After  dinner  and  packing  we  rode  over  hither 
(Sharon),  Howe,  the  keeper  of  the  house,  driving 
us.  The  country  is  very  beautiful,  and  so  is  the 
ride  by  sunset  and  quarter  moonlight.  We 
arrived  here  at  about  8.20  o'clock,  after  a  three 
hours'  ride.  Stopped  in  driving  up  the  hill  to 
drink  a  glass  of  the  mineral  water  which  is 
strongly  impregnated  with  sulphur,  having  the 
taste  and  smell  of  sulphuretted  hydrogen. 

(Channing,  who  was  himself  an  adventurous 
improver  on  nature,  had  been  at  Sharon  a  few 
years  before.  He  had  then  organized  a  little 
party  to  go  out  into  the  forest  which  was  on  our 
horizon,  and  they  had  climbed  a  certain  tall  pine 
in  the  forest  which  overtopped  the  rest.  They 
had  trimmed  out  the  branches  so  as  to  leave  a 
well-defined  Roman  cross  on  the  horizon  as  visi 
ble  from  the  piazza  of  the  hotel.  On  this  visit 
of  ours,  to  my  delight  and  to  his  disgust,  the 
hotel  attendant  who  showed  us  the  lions  of  the 
place  pointed  out  this  cross  as  a  fine  natural 
phenomenon,  and  in  answer  to  questions  on  the 
subject,  said  it  had  never  been  touched  by  axe 
or  saw.  Such  is  tradition  and  such  is  fame.) 

By  a  long  hot  walk  to  a  neighboring  farmer's 
we  were  able  to  secure  a  lumber  wagon  and  two 
horses  to  take  us  over  to  Cherry  Valley,  eight 


354        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

miles,  in  time  for  the  Cooperstown  stage.  We 
had  set  our  hearts  on  going  to  Cooperstown.  We 
ate  our  dinner  in  some  dread  lest  we  were  too 
late  ;  our  teamster  had  pronounced  that  it  would 
require  an  hour  and  a  half  to  go  over.  His 
chariot  wheels  tarried  too  long  as  he  brought  his 
wagon  up  to  the  house,  but  finally,  just  before  1, 
we  got  under  way  in  a  red  lumber  wagon 
without  springs.  It  proved  for  all  that,  how 
ever,  a  very  comfortable  vehicle.  We  had 
wagon  chairs  in  it  carefully  cushioned  and  skin- 
covered.  We  drove  fast,  and  at  2.10  we  were  at 
Cherry  Valley.  The  stage  did  not  appear  till 
fifteen  minutes  afterwards,  and  we  had  time  to 
hear  a  crude  bar-room  political  conversation,  to 
take  a  walk  in  the  village,  to  try  to  buy  "  The 
Pioneers,"  and  to  plan  out  to-morrow's  route  be 
fore  starting.  From  Cherry  Valley  to  Coopers- 
town  is  twelve  or  fourteen  miles.  The  stage 
drove  quickly,  and  a  very  pleasant  ride  we  had. 
The  day  was  clear,  but  we  did  not  feel  the  heat 
unpleasantly,  and  had  the  whole  stage  most  of 
the  way  to  ourselves.  In  this  part  of  the  state 
the  woodlands,  consisting  almost  entirely  of  de 
ciduous  trees,  are  like  the  Western  woods,  open, 
quite  destitute  of  undergrowth,  so  that  they 
have  the  aspect  of  the  artificial  growth  of  a 


NOW   AND    THEN  355 

gentleman's  park  of  a  country  house  or  such  like, 
marked,  however,  at  the  same  time,  with  the 
greatest  variety  of  species  and  perfection  of  in 
dividual  trees.  Just  at  this  time  they  were  be 
ginning  to  change  their  colors,  so  that  the  shades 
of  different  trees,  and  different  shapes,  were  more 
beautiful  than  ever  in  summer,  —  not  the  gor- 
geousness  of  later  autumn,  but  a  beauty  of  light 
and  shade  as  the  sunlight  came  upon  them  such 
as  I  thought  I  had  never  seen  before. 

Into  Cooperstown  we  rode  by  the  same  down 
hill  road  as  that  which  introduces  the  Pioneers 
to  the  reader.  Our  plan  was  to  sleep  there  if 
we  could  do  no  better.  But  we  found  a  boat 
man  willing  to  send  us  up  Lake  Otsego  to 
Bailey's  Tavern.  And  despite  the  wonder  of 
the  innkeeper,  who  told  us  the  plan  was  unheard 
of,  and  despite  the  lightness  of  the  wind,  we 
sent  our  trunks  to  the  boat.  We  could  take  an 
afternoon's  fishing,  if  nothing  else.  A  beautiful 
sail  we  had  on  beautiful  Otsego  Lake.  Take  it 
all  in  all,  I  think  Cooperstown  the  prettiest 
town  I  know  of  in  position.  We  had  a  chance 
to  walk  through  it  before  starting  in  our  in 
effectual  effort  to  buy  "  The  Pioneers." 

Friday,  September  20,  1844.  —  Very  hot,  clear. 
From  William  Bailey's  Tavern,  in  Middlefield, 


356        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

on  Otsego  Lake,  to  Trenton  Falls.  At  this  little, 
out-of-the-way  place  we  found  very  good  quarters 
and  slept  enthusiastically  and  soundly.  On  de 
liberation  and  consultation  Chanriing  determined 
that  he  would  leave  me  at  Fort  Plains  and  go 
homeward  while  I  should  go  west  to  Utica. 

The  stage  for  Fort  Plains  appeared  at  about 
8.15.  We  could  not  get  outside  seats,  but 
within  we  had  to  ourselves  the  whole  of  the 
middle  seat,  with  but  five  other  passengers  be 
fore  and  behind  us;  two  of  them  were  children. 
During  most  of  the  ride  we  passed  over  the  high 
dividing  ridge  between  Otsego  and  the  Mohawk 
(at  one  point  of  which  an  intelligent  travelling 
companion  said  we  were  twelve  hundred  feet 
above  the  Mohawk's  level).  There  had  been 
frost  enough  to  begin  the  changes  on  the  forest 
foliage.  Like  those  we  saw  yesterday,  the  woods 
were  beautifully  varied.  The  first  tinting,  when 
each  begins  to  vary  from  the  others  in  coloring, 
with  but  few  strong  contrasts,  is  certainly  one  of 
the  most  beautiful  of  the  autumn  phases.  I  do 
not  think  I  have  ever  seen  it  so  constantly  in 
such  exquisite  perfection  as  to-day  and  yesterday. 

From  the  beautiful  to  the  ridiculous,  as  we 
rode  into  the  town  of  Fort  Plains  we  found  that 
a  militia  training  was  in  progress.  The  main 


NOW   AND    THEN  357 

street  of  the  town  was  crowded  with  booths, 
and  horses  and  carriages  and  people.  Promi 
nent  among  these  were  the  horse-cart  pedlers, 
who  made  up  the  principal  noise  of  the  fair,  for 
fair  it  was,  by  their  auction  sales.  Three  of  them, 
as  near  together  as  their  carts  could  stand,  con 
stantly  offered  select  lots  of  their  wares  for  such 
bids  as  they  could  get.  "  Now,  gentlemen,  here's 
a  bottle  of  excellent  writing  ink,  to  which  I  will 
add  (diving  into  his  cart)  a  pair  of  wooden 
combs,  and  a  no-mistake,  straightforward  steel 
pen,  and  a  pure  silver  thimble,  worth  twenty- 
five  cents  —  and  —  a  bottle  of  essence  of  pepper 
mint —  and  —  how  much  shall  I  have  for  the 
lot  ? "  I  actually  saw  the  progress  of  the  forma 
tion  and  sale  of  this  lot  which  was  sold  for  nine- 
pence  to  a  decent-looking  man  who  was  assured 
by  the  pedler  that  he  would  not  want  to  buy 
anything  else  for  nine  years. 

All  this  we  had  some  ten  minutes  to  enjoy  as 
the  stage  stopped  for  the  mail.  We  caught  a 
distant  glimpse  of  the  regiment  which  in  the 
distance  looked  military  enough.  A  single  com 
pany  which  formed  close  by  us  in  the  street 
looked  the  perfect  realization  of  the  caricature 
prints  of  Johnston  and  the  others  in  ridicule  of 
the  militia.  And  yet  this  did  not  seem  to  be 


358        MEMORIES   OF    A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

meant  for  burlesque,  but  to  be  the  result  of  utter 
ignorance  and  carelessness.  The  men  were  all 
dressed  in  something  which  bore  marks  of  mili 
tary  appearance,  but  such  equipments  had  evi 
dently  been  selected  at  random.  I  noticed  one 
man,  who,  having  failed  to  stick  a  white  plume 
in  his  hat,  carried  it  buttoned  up  in  his  coat  at 
the  breast. 

From  the  village  we  rode  down  to  the  depot. 
In  the  three-quarters  of  an  hour  before  the  cars 
arrived  Channing  and  I  bathed  in  the  Mohawk. 
Here  I  bade  him  good-by. 

My  train  left  Fort  Plains  at  11.45.  All  the 
way  to  Utica  the  scenery  is  pleasingly  beautiful. 
At  Utica  at  2.15.  Dined  there. 

I  started  in  a  buggy  for  this  place.  The  even 
ing  was  beautiful,  but  the  afternoon  bitterly  hot. 
I  had  also  to  thaw  out  a  very  crusty  driver. 

(At  that  time  Trenton  Falls,  midway  between 
Albany  and  Niagara,  were  visited  by  almost 
every  adventurous  traveller  who  had  undertaken 
the  Niagara  journey.  I  am  afraid  that  the  dis 
tance  from  the  Vanderbilt  line  of  railway  pre 
vents  travellers  from  going  there  now.  All  I 
can  say  is,  so  much  the  worse  for  the  traveller. 
I  think  that  the  hotel  is  well  kept  up,  and  in 
the  sixty  years  of  life  which  I  have  passed 


NOW   AND   THEN  359 

since,  I  have  found  no  place  more  attractive 
or  beautiful.) 

I  have  walked  down  to  the  gorge  to-night  to 
see  it  by  moonlight.  I  must  have  been  tired 
when  I  wrote  those  last  lines,  to  say  nothing 
more  of  my  first  view,  only  of  the  water  and 
gorge  though  it  were.  I  turn  to  this  page  again 
at  Owego,  four  or  five  days  after.  Those  high, 
bold  cliffs  just  running  back  form  a  perpen 
dicular  with  the  rich,  high  forest  foliage  that 
covered  them  where  one  was  lighted  by  the 
moon  and  the  other  in  black  shadow.  As  I 
saw  them  Sunday  night,  or  when  the  moon 
touched  parts  of  both,  as  it  did  on  Friday  night, 
it  was  all  grand,  —  very  grand.  Deep  down  as 
I  was  in  the  cleft,  it  reminded  me  of  Schoharie. 

Saturday  Morning,  September  21. — As  soon 
as  breakfast  was  done  I  went  down  to  the 
stream.  And  till  1  o'clock  I  was  passing  through 
the  chasm,  up  and  down.  And  I  hated  to 
go  away,  even  after  five  hours,  more  than  I 
should  have  hated  to  have  gone  without  seeing 
them.  I  walked  up  slowly,  stopped  half  an 
hour  at  the  first,  and  half  an  hour  more  at  the 
second  rapids.  If  there  had  been  nothing  more 
than  the  strange  and  beautiful  foliage  of  the 
valley  and  the  boldness  of  the  cliffs,  with  that 


360        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

deep  black  stream  lashing  itself  up  in  a  series 
of  such  rapids  as  those,  I  should  have  been 
quite  satisfied.  I  had  always  heard  people  speak 
of  Trenton  Falls  as  a  series  of  descents;  and  I 
supposed  that  there  were  perhaps  no  positive 
cascades.  So  that  when  I  walked  a  few  steps 


TRENTON  FALLS. 
From  an  old  print. 

farther  up  than  the  higher  of  these  two  rapids, 
and  saw  the  lowest  fall,  it  took  me  all  by  sur 
prise,  and  I  sat  and  stood  and  wondered  and 
admired  for  an  hour  more.  I  watched  the 
texture  of  the  foam  spreading  out  as  it  descends, 
and  then  took  in  the  whole  and  listened,  and 
then  rainbow  gazed  till  I  could  have  cried,  and 


NOW   AND    THEN  361 

then  I  walked  up  higher.  And  there  was  the 
great  fall,  the  first  time.  After  half  an  hour 
perhaps  of  the  coup  d'oeil  of  its  lower  foam 
cascade  and  the  perpendicular  cataract,  I  ran  up 
to  this  and  sat  in  a  shady  nook,  close  by  its 
wildest  rush  of  foam,  to  watch  that.  And  there 
I  could  have  stayed  all  day. 

The  walk  afterwards  is  beautiful,  —  very.  A 
foaming  caldron.  The  first  rapid  above  the 
"  mill-dam "  falls  is  very  grand,  and  the  vista 
down  the  stream,  with  its  perspective  of  foliage 
on  the  banks,  is  beautiful.  Although  none  of 
these  trees  here  have  their  full  autumn  costume, 
all  of  them  are  slightly  gilded,  so  that  the  form 
of  each  is  perfectly  distinct  in  the  very  thick 
mass  of  forest. 

The  highest  point  of  the  stream  that  one  can 
well  walk  to  above  the  Eock  Heart  is  very  curi 
ous,  —  the  channel  is  so  very  deep  and  narrow. 
Black  as  Erebus,  it  rushes  by,  so  deep  that  you 
cannot  find  bottom,  however  deeply  you  throw 
down  a  stick.  It  rises,  or  seems  to  rise,  without 
touching. 

After  dinner  I  rushed  down  to  the  stream 
again  as  quickly  as  might  be.  A  thunder  shower 
was  coming  up,  and  I  was  afraid  that  I  should 
lose  most  of  the  afternoon  on  account  of  the  rain. 


362         MEMORIES    OF   A    HUNDRED    YEARS 

Sure  enough,  I  had  hardly  reached  the  lower  fall 
when  the  rain  began.  I  had  my  umbrella,  but  it 
at  once  appeared  that  the  cliff  overhangs  there 
so  much  that  there  was  an  immense  reach  shel 
tered,  and  there  I  sat  and  enjoyed.  There  were 
some  women  who  wished  to  go  farther,  and  to 
them  I  willingly  gave  up  my  umbrella,  and  sat 
through  the  whole  shower,  looking  down  upon 
that  wonderful  fall.  The  thunder  began  soon 
after  I  was  there.  Caroline  King  had  told  me 
in  speaking  of  Niagara  that  thunder  was  readily 
distinguishable  from  the  sound  of  a  cataract,  but 
I  could  not  understand  it  till  I  heard  them  both 
here.  The  water  sound  itself  was  grand  and  full 
toned,  growing,  as  I  thought,  louder  and  louder, 
and  deeper  and  deeper,  with  every  moment  of 
rain  —  and  then  the  heavy  blow  of  thunder 
would  ring  down  side  by  side  with  the  other, 
without  for  a  moment  eclipsing  it,  at  first  per 
fectly  distinct  from  it,  but  as  it  echoed  up  and 
down  the  gorge  finally  lost  in  the  echoes  of  the 
fall  and  those  of  the  other  falls  and  rapids  above 
and  below.  For  an  hour  there  were  these  sub 
lime  tones  ringing  round  me,  in  accompaniment 
to  the  fall  of  the  surge  below  me.  And  in  the 
rain  the  opposite  shores,  half-veiled,  had  a  pecul 
iar  beauty,  quite  different  from  that  of  the  morn- 


NOW    AND    THEN  363 

ing  or  of  last  evening,  when  they  were  in  such 
different  lights. 

The  rain  stopped  a  little  while,  and  when  it 
came  on  again  I  was  halfway  up  the  upper  leap 
of  the  largest  fall,  and  there  I  again  ensconced 
myself  in  shelter  quite  close  to  the  falling  water. 
The  widest  part  of  this  leap  falls  in  a  smooth, 
thin  curtain  into  the  basin  below.  When  I  first 
saw  it  there  was  so  little  water  that  in  many 
places  this  was  broken  into  several  streams.  To 
the  right,  as  you  look  down,  a  much  greater 
mass  of  water  rushes  over  in  a  somewhat  differ 
ent  direction,  and  so  broken  by  obstacles  as  to 
make  a  thick  mass  of  foam.  A  single  rock  sepa 
rates  this  at  the  top  from  the  deepest  stream  of 
all,  which  leaps  off,  however,  so  as  to  strike  it 
halfway  down.  By  this  whirling  pillar  of  water 
I  seated  myself  and  enjoyed. 

I  was  at  the  house  all  the  evening.  The  next 
morning  I  went  to  Trenton.  (I  had  sent  over 
to  my  friend,  Mr.  Buckingham  at  Trenton  Vil 
lage,  to  say  that  I  would  preach  for  him  on  Sun 
day.  It  proved  that  he  was  ill  and  that  the 
church  was  to  be  closed.  But  they  rang  the  bell, 
and  when  I  arrived  at  Trenton  the  people  from 
the  country  round  were  beginning  to  come  in. 
It  was  the  first  and  last  occasion  when  I  have 


364        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

known  the  ringing  of  a  Sunday  bell  to  serve  the 
purpose  for  which  it  was  intended.  On  Monday 
I  resumed  the  journey  which  these  lines  are 
describing.) 

Monday,  September  23,  1844.  —  Cool  and  fine. 
Trenton  Falls.  Ithaca.  I  was  knocked  up,  as  I 
had  appointed,  before  4,  got  up  and  dressed,  and 
locked  up  and  was  under  way,  driven  by  the 
hostler  of  Moore's  stable,  in  a  good  double  wagon, 
at  4.15.  It  was  very  cold.  We  kept  warm  by 
occasionally  running  up  a  hill  on  foot.  The 
sunrise  was  very  fine,  just  as  we  were  on  the 
high  hill  between  Trenton  and  Utica.  Break 
fast  at  Utica,  sent  off  by  Pomeroy  to  Boston  my 
box  of  minerals,  bought  a  map  of  the  state  to 
replace  that  which  I  left  at  Springfield,  and 
started  for  Auburn  on  my  way  to  Cayuga. 
Could  not  buy  tickets  farther  than  Auburn. 
Syracuse  is  a  large,  bustling  town,  where,  as 
Pepys  would  say,  I  bought  a  watch  key.  (I 
think  there  is  some  astrological  connection  be 
tween  me  and  Syracuse  and  watch  keys.  I 
should  say  that  sooner  or  later  I  have  bought 
a  half-dozen  there  under  different  exigencies.) 

At  Auburn,  where  we  arrived  at  12.15, 1  found 
to  my  horror  that  the  Cayuga  Lake  boat  left  the 
northern  end  of  the  lake  at  1,  and  that  we  stopped 


NOW   AND   THEN  365 

to  dine  till  2.  Cayuga  Bridge  eleven  miles  off ! 
I  had  nothing  to  do  but  bear  it.  Put  my  bag 
gage  (after  dinner)  on  board  for  Cayuga  Bridge, 
to  take  my  chance  of  a  boat  there,  but  resolved 
to  go  on  to  Seneca  Lake  at  Geneva  for  to-morrow's 
boat  if  it  proved  necessary.  Fortunately,  how 
ever,  at  Cayuga  Bridge  I  found  the  D.  W. 
Clinton,  a  towboat,  just  going  up.  The  only 
other  boat  had  gone  an  hour  and  a  half  before. 
Arrived  at  Ithaca,  forty  miles,  at  9  o'clock  P.M., 
walked  up  to  the  Clinton  Hotel,  leaving  my 
trunk  to  be  sent  up  in  the  morning.  (I  beg  the 
remaining  readers  to  note  that  the  cars  change 
once  between  Utica  and  Cayuga  Lake.  Such 
was  the  habit  of  that  time.  I  have  remem 
bered  ever  since  the  shock  I  inflicted  on  the 
only  passenger  of  this  freight  boat.  She  was  a 
dear  old  lady,  not  disinclined  to  talk.  As  I 
passed  a  golden  field,  where  wheat  had  been 
reaped  not  long  before,  I  said  to  her  that  this 
was  the  first  field  of  wheat  which  I  had  ever 
seen.  The  good  lady's  surprise,  her  sad  indig 
nation  that  a  young  man  should  tell  so  unnec 
essary  a  lie,  has  been  a  warning  to  me  ever  since. 
The  statement  was  perfectly  true,  but  seemed  to 
her  as  utterly  false  as  words  could  be.) 

Tuesday,  September  24,  1844.  —  From  Ithaca 


366        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

to  Owego.  All  day,  until  1.44,  riding.  To  Owego 
on  the  railroad  from  Ithaca.  The  cars  were 
announced  to  start  at  6.  I  was  called  at  twenty 
minutes  before  six,  dressed  in  all  haste,  and  found 
my  trunk  had  not  come  up  from  the  steamboat 
landing.  After  sundry  chafferings  I  took  a 
buggy,  drove  down  and  got  it  myself.  Break 
fasted,  and  then  took  the  open  omnibus  for  the 
R.  depot  on  the  hilltop.  A  long,  very  steep, 
inclined  plane  takes  freight  from  the  lake 
up  to  the  railroad,  but  passengers  ride  up  this 
steep  hill.  There  began  a  series  of  delays  which 
lasted  through  the  trip.  There  were  some  twenty 
passengers.  We  were  put  into  a  wretchedly 
decayed,  three-parted  car,  and  waited,  say  from 
7  o'clock  to  8.20,  then  with  a  large  load  of 
freight,  mostly  plaster,  we  started.  We  travelled 
fifteen  miles  ifi  an  hour  and  three-quarters,  when 
it  was  announced  that  at  the  halfway  house  we 
must  wait  an  hour  while  a  key  of  the  piston  was 
mended.  We  waited  three,  till  1.5,  and  started 
again.  Constantly  stopped  for  want  of  power, 
finally  ran  a  plaster  car  off  the  track,  and  left  it 
there,  much  to  my  joy,  and  at  last  arrived  here, 
twenty-nine  miles,  at  1.44.  The  last  quarter  of 
a  mile  I  walked.  The  car  was  drawn  up  by  a 
horse  and  got  here  about  4  o'clock.  (It  had 


NOW   AND   THEN  367 

taken  us  the  better  part  of  the  day  to  do  thirty 
miles.  I  remember  I  went  to  Glemnary,  the 
pretty  residence  of  Nathaniel  Parker  Willis ;  at 
that  time  he  was  writing  from  there  what  were 
known  as  the  Glenmary  Letters.) 

Wednesday,  September  25,  1844.  —  Cool,  pleas 
ant,  sky  overcast,  with  a  few  drops  of  rain. 
Owego  —  Brownstown,  Penn. 

We  started  at  8.30  from  Owego  in  the  "  stage," 
a  large,  two-seated  wagon  with  a  pair  of  horses. 
The  passengers  were,  beside  me,  on  the  back  seat 
a  woman  and  child,  in  front  a  sailor  and  an 
Englishman,  Mr.  McRae  of  New  York.  We 
forded  the  Susquehanna  about  three  miles  below 
Owego,  and  after  we  came  to  Nichols  crossed  the 
hills  to  Rome,  Pennsylvania,  say  twenty-two 
miles.  At  Rome  there  was  a  mass  Polk  meeting 
of  perhaps  one  hundred  and  fifty  persons. 

(I  will  not  follow  the  detail  of  the  journal 
farther.  The  detail  is  amusing  to  me,  but  I 
must  not  make  this  reader  follow  my  advance 
through  Thursday  and  Friday  by  different 
"stages"  and  wagons,  to  the  Pennsylvania  Canal 
system,  on  one  of  the  upper  branches  of  the 
Susquehanna.  There  was  no  railroad,  and  the 
customs  of  the  country  were  such  that  no  one 
liked  to  take  me  more  than  ten  miles.  I  would 


368        MEMORIES   OF   A   HUNDRED   YEARS 

advance  ten  miles  with  my  luggage,  and  at  the 
livery  stable  of  Towanda  or  Tunkhannock,  or 
whatever  place  might  be,  I  hired  another  driver 
for  another  half  an  hour.  As  I  approached 
Brownstown,  in  Pennsylvania,  which  I  arn  sorry 
to  say  I  do  not  find  on  my  "  Scribner's  Atlas," 


SUSQUEHANNA   CANAL  AND  BOATS,   1844. 

at  half-past  one  in  the  morning,  I  told  my  driver 
that  I  would  not  go  farther  till  I  knew  where 
we  were.  So  we  waked  up  a  sleeper  in  the 
first  house  we  came  to,  and  with  some  hesitancy 
I  asked  him  how  far  we  were  from  Brownstown. 
"  Stranger,"  he  cried,  to  my  relief,  "  you  are  in 
the  very  centre  of  the  metropolis  of  Browns- 


NOW   AND    THEN  369 

town."  And  we  were.  There  was  a  country 
inn  nearly  opposite. 

By  such  resources,  through  Thursday  and 
Friday  of  that  week,  we  reached  on  Friday  the 
Canal  system ;  I  think,  at  Northumberland.  I  re 
member  that  we  arrived  at  the  stopping-place  of 
the  canal-boat  in  the  morning,  five  minutes  late, 
and  that  my  skilful  driver  put  the  wagon  on  the 
tow-path,  and  we  followed  and  overtook  the 
boat.  I  leaped  on  board,  my  trunk  was  taken 
on  board,  and  that  beautiful  voyage  down  the 
Susquehanna  began.  Unfortunately  for  me,  a 
little  above  Harrisburg,  on  that  journey,  my 
stovepipe  hat  was  knocked  off  by  a  low  bridge, 
and  only  recovered  by  the  boatman  with  his 
boat  hook.  It  was  full  of  water,  alas,  and  for 
two  or  three  days  it  was  drying  itself  in  front  of 
such  fires  as  offered.  I  safely,  though  slowly, 
travelled  on  toward  Washington,  and  on  the 
afternoon  of  Saturday  was  delivered  at  York, 
Pennsylvania.  From  that  point  there  was,  as 
there  is,  a  railway  to  Baltimore.  There  was  a 
train  to  take  me  thither,  and  I  arrived  at  Balti 
more  at  Barnum's  Hotel  in  time  for  supper. 

To  the  young  traveller  I  need  not  say  that  by 
this  time  I  was  without  money,  but  to  those  that 
believe  that  fortune  favors  the  brave,  I  need  not 


370        MEMORIES   OF   A  HUNDRED   YEARS 

say  that  iny  dear  classmate  and  friend,  Nathaniel 
Holmes  Morison,  afterwards  the  distinguished 
Provost  of  the  Peabody  Library,  lived  in  town, 
and  that  I  walked  up  and  called  on  him,  and 
borrowed  five  dollars  of  him.  The  incident  is 
not  worth  mentioning,  but  that  I  think  that  this 
was  the  first  time  I  had  ever  seen  the  gold  coin  of 
my  own  country.  I  took  the  4  o'clock  morning 
train  from  Baltimore  to  Washington  ;  and  to  the 
great  relief  of  my  friend  Abbott,  reported  with 
the  sermon  at  his  hospitable  home,  which  was  at 
the  corner  of  I  Street  and  Seventeenth  Street, 
where  Mr.  Pollock  afterwards  built  a  palace 
which  now  stands. 

As  I  count  up  the  number  of  carriages  between 
Beverly  and  Washington,  this  involves  twenty- 
eight  changes  of  carriages  for  a  journey  achieved 
in  thirteen  days. 

Now  note  the  contrast  between  1844  and 
1904. 

From  Boston  to  Washington  in  1904. — Carriage 
to  station  at  12  M.  Train  to  New  York,  arriving 
at  6  P.M.  Manhattan  Hotel.  Saturday  morning, 
carriage  to  Royal  Blue  at  Liberty  Street,  and  by 
train  to  Washington,  3.50  P.M.  Automobile  from 
Baltimore  station  to  Eighteenth  Street.  Time, 
twenty-seven  hours.) 


INDEX 


INDEX 


Abbot,  George  J.  — 

Habits  of  Daniel  Webster,  II,  34. 

Intimacy  with,  II,  141. 
Adams,  C.  F.,  memoirs  of  J.  Q. 

Adams,  II,  138-139. 
Adams,   Henry,   history  of  years 
between    1801   and   1817,   I, 
182-184. 
Adams,  John  — 

"Filibuster,"  I,  64. 

Hamilton  appointed  as  com 
mander  of  army  under 
Washington,  I,  64. 

Massachusetts  constitution,  im 
portance  of  education,  II,  268. 

Philadelphia  yellow  fever  anec 
dote,  I,  226-227. 

Remark  as  to  diaries,  II,  349. 
Adams,  John  Quincy  — 

Congregational  Council  Modera 
tor,  II,  138. 

Intimacy  with  Alex.  Everett,  I, 
117,  259,  260. 

Journal,  Monroe's  administra 
tion,  I,  234-2:36. 

Massachusetts  vote,  1828,  I,  272- 
273. 

Memoirs,  II,  138-139. 

Monroe  Doctrine,  I,  246-249. 

Plymouth  Colony  District,  Rep 
resentative  in  Congress,  II, 
136. 

Popularity,  II,  137. 

Russia,  mission  to,  I,  117,  259. 

Slavery,  attitude,  II,  126-127. 
"  Jineid,"  a  hasty  course  in  the, 

II,  310. 
Africa  — 

Colonization  Society,  formation, 
1817,  II,  123-124. 


Africa —  Continued. 
Tripoli  tan  war  conquest  of  Derne, 

I,  58-62. 

Alabama,  admission  to  Union,  I, 
238. 

Alamo  massacre,  Texas  indepen 
dence,  II,  148. 

Alleghanies,  canal  scheme,  I,  305. 

Allen,  Rev.  J.  H.,  on  editorial 
board  of  Christian  Exam 
iner,  II,  343. 

Alpha  Delta  Phi,  literary  society, 

II,  259. 

America,  discovery,  results  of, 
Abbe  Genty  prize  essay,  1792, 

I,  16,  20 ;  II,  284-288. 
"America,"  Alexander  Everett's, 

II,  329-330. 

Amory,  Thomas  C.,  editing  of 
Heath-Washington  letters, 

I,  161. 

Andover  Theological  Seminary, 
annual  commencement,  1861, 

II,  188. 

Appomattox  Valley,  surrender  of 

Lee,  II,  214-215. 
Arabs,  American  colony  at  Cairo, 

I,  62-63. 

Atlantic  Monthly  — 
Article    in,    ancedote,    II,   215- 

217. 
"Autocrat    of     the     Breakfast 

Table"  in,  II,  333. 
Birth  of  the,  II,  333. 
"Dot  and  Line  Alphabet "  article 

in,  II,  342. 
Augusta,  chaise  drive  of  Nathan 

Hale  to  Bangor,  I,  114,  117. 
Austin,  J.  T.,  lecture  on  siege  of 
Boston,  I,  146. 


373 


374 


INDEX 


Austria,    Motley   as    minister    to 

Vienna,  II,  78-79. 
Authors  — 

Sparks's  advice,  II,  54. 
"  Toning  down  "  writings,  II,  8-9. 
Warning  to  young  writers,  II,  251. 
[See  also  names,  Holmes,  etc.] 
"  Autocrat     of      the      Breakfast 

Table"  — 

Advent  of,  II,  250,  333. 
Series  in  New  England  Maga 
zine,  II,  249,  333. 
Ayres,  Miss,  school,  I,  269. 

Baker,  Miss  L.,  play  at  Faneuil 

Hall,  1776,  I,  155. 
Baltimore  conventions  — 
Harrison  election,  1840,  accident 

to  delegate,  I,  231-232. 
National  conventions  for  election 

of  President,  I,  232,  278. 
Bancroft,  George  — 
Characteristics  and  beliefs,  II, 

59-60. 

Collector  of  the  Customs,  II,  56. 
History,  work  on,  II,  55-56,  58, 

61,  62. 

Intimacy  with,  II,  56,  61. 
Manuscripts,  II,  61. 
Newport  home,  roses,  II,  65. 
Polk,  J.  K.,  election  as  President 
and  intimacy  with,  II,  63-64. 
Step-sons,  education  of,  II,  57. 
Bangor,  chaise    drive  of    Nathan 
Hale  from  Augusta,  1, 1 14, 117. 
Barlow,  Joel,  publication  of  poem 

hi  London,  II,  228. 
Basins,  "full"  and  "empty,"  in 

Back  Bay,  II,  331. 
Battles  — 

Bunker  Hill,  see  that  title. 
Civil  War,  see  that  title. 
San  Jacinto,  Texas  independence, 

II,  148. 

Bayley,  General,  Civil  War,  II,  175. 
Beacon  Hill,  Boston,  levelling,  etc., 

I,  132-133. 

Bean,    Ellis  —  journey    of    Philip 
Nolan  in  Texas,  I,  78-79. 


Beecher,  Henry  Ward,    "Sharp's 

Rifle  Beecher,"  II,  165. 
Bennington  victory  and  trophies, 
Revolutionary  War,  I,  150- 
151. 

Bill  of  Rights  of  Massachusetts, 
freedom  passage,  II,  108-110. 
Bismarck,  acquaintance  with  Mot 
ley,  II,  79. 

Blackburn,  Ephraim,  of  Nolan  ex 
pedition,  I,  81,  83. 
Bliss,  W.  D.  and  A.,  step-sons  of 

George  Bancroft,  II,  57. 
"Blockade  of  Boston,"  play  inci 
dent,  1776,  I,  155. 
Books  of  Dr.  Hale's  boyhood,  II, 

307-309. 
Boott,  K.,  garden  to  Boston  house, 

I,  125. 
Boston  — 
Area,  1808,  I,  132. 
Beacon  Hill,  levelling,  etc.,  I, 

132-133. 

"Blockade  of  Boston,"  play  in 
cident,  I,  155. 
Bunker  Hill,  battle  of,  see  that 

title. 
Coasting    scene,    Revolutionary 

anecdote,  I,  158. 
Common,  British  redoubts  and 
grass  circles  of  Revolution 
ary  times,  I,  152-153. 
Comparison  in  life  of  1808  and 

to-day,  I,  123-133. 
Cornhill  of  to-day  and  of  1808,  I, 

123. 

Daily  Advertiser,  Nathan  Hale 

as  editor,   I,   114,   117,   118, 

119,  129,  260,  261;    II,  135, 

164. 

Derne  Street  and  the  conquest  of 

Derne,  I,  64. 

Eighteenth    century,   beginning 
of,  celebration,  II,  290-296. 
Emerson  lectures,  1833,  II,  230. 
Faneuil  Hall,  see  that  title. 
Fuel  and  molasses,  I,  131. 
Gardens  to  private  houses,  1808, 
1,123-125;  11,304. 


INDEX 


375 


Boston  —  Continued. 

Kale's  (Nathan)  career,  I,  111- 
118. 

Hancock  Cushman  School,  Eng 
lish  taught  to  foreign  pupils, 

I,  107. 

Historical  study  and   research, 

causes  of,  II,  45-4(5. 
Journey  from,  to  Washington,  in 

1844,  II,  347-370. 
Latin  School,  see  that  title. 
Libraries,  historical  collections, 

II,  45-46. 

Magazines  originating  in,  II,  330, 
332-333,  335-338,  341-343. 

Middlesex  Canal,  charter,  con 
struction,  etc.,  1,299. 

Model  of  town  made  by  French 
man,  I,  123. 

Population,  1808,  I,  132. 

Powder-house,  visit  of  General 
Washington,  I,  147. 

Railroad,  1833,  I,  130;  II,  309. 

Revolutionary  men,  1808,  I,  134. 

Rum  manufacture,  I,  131-132; 
II,  115. 

Schoolday  reminiscences,  I,  265- 
270 ;  II,  309-310. 

Siege,  see  Boston,  Siege  of. 

Social  changes,  1808  and  to-day, 
I,  125-133. 

Smaller  Boston  in  1808,  I,  123- 
133. 

Stables,  Boston,  of  1808,  I,  127- 
129. 

State  House,  laying  corner-stone 
of  annex,  I,  133. 

Tea  Party,  see  Boston  Tea  Party. 

Twentieth  century,  beginning  of, 
celebration,  II,  290-29(5. 

Twentieth  Century  Club,  II,  281. 

Vehicles  of  1808,  I,  130. 

Washington's  entry  into,  I,  1(52, 
1(54,  173. 

Webster's  address  on  Missouri 
Compromise,  I,  244,  245;  II, 
120-121. 

Webster's  career,  I,  118;  II, 
26. 


Boston,  Siege  of  — 
Austin's  (J.  T.)  lecture,  I,  146. 
History  of,  traditional  anecdotes, 

I,  135-159. 
Boston  Tea  Party 

Melvill,  Major,  I,  138,  140,  142. 
Sprague,  Charles,   father  of,   I, 

140. 

Story  of,  I,  139-141. 
Boston  and  Worcester  railroad  — 
Construction,  I,  130,  292;  II,  309. 
Fessenden,  J.  M.,   report  on  T 

rails  and  flat  rails,  I,  310. 
Steam  power,  reports,  I,  309-310. 
Bowcloin,  Governor  J.,  garden  to 
Beacon  St.  house,  Boston,  I, 
124. 

Boyhood,     recollections     of     Dr. 

Hale's,  1, 264-273 ;  II,  302-310. 

Bradbury  and   Soden,  publishers, 

II,  334-336. 

Braddock's  defeat,  American  Rev 
olution,  I,  162,  166. 

Bread,  white,  story  of  Josiah 
Quincy,  I,  296. 

Broke,  Captain  P.  B.  V.,  surren 
der  of  Chesapeake  to  Shan 
non,  1813,  I,  205-214. 

Brooks's  assault  on  Sumner,  II, 
163-164. 

Brown,  Dr.  G.  N.,  printing-press 
established  in  Lawrence,  II, 
159,  164. 

Brow.n,  Mrs.  Nancy,  description  of 
Bunker  Hill  battle,  I,  144. 

Browning,  Mrs.  — 

"  Cry  of  the  Children  "  by,  first 

publication,  II,  336. 
"  Toning  down  "of  "  Lady  Ger- 
aldine's  Courtship  "  passage, 
II,  9. 

Brownstown,  Pa.,  visit  to,  in  1844, 

II,  368-3(59. 

j  Bryant,  W.  C.,  introduction  to,  II, 
74. 

Bryant  and  Gay's  History,  writing 
for,  II,  62. 

Bryce,  James,   state  and  national 
1  government  in  U.S.,  I,  217. 


376 


INDEX 


Buckingham  Brothers,  New  Eng 
land  Magazine  founded  by, 
II,  333. 
Builders  —  the  four  founders,  1, 16- 

18. 

Bull  Run,  impressions  as  to  army 
after  defeat  at,  II,  178-182, 
185  (note}. 

Bunker  Hill,  battle  of — 
Description  —  wounded     British 

soldiers,  I,  144-145. 
Monument,  corner-stone  laid  by 

Lafayette,  I,  137. 
Burgoyne's    surrender,    American 

Revolution,  I,  143-144. 
Burke,  Edmund,  eloquence  of,  Ed 
ward  Everett's  opinion,  II,  7. 
Burr,  Aaron  — 
Davis's  life  of,  I,  97. 
Jackson,  A.,  suggested  as  candi 
date  for  President,  1, 275-276. 
Jefferson,  acquaintance  with,  I, 

88,  95-97. 

Journey  down  Ohio  and  Missis 
sippi  rivers,  I,  98-99. 
Mystery  of  career,  I,  91. 
New  York  politics,  1795-1800,  I, 

88,  91. 

Plot,  see  Burr  conspiracy. 
Presidential  candidate  with  Jef 
ferson,  I,  92,  95. 
Slavery  attitude,  II,  100. 
Vice-President,  I,  .96,  97,  98. 
Virginia  junto,  opinion,  I,  224. 
[See  also  Burr  conspiracy.] 
Burr  conspiracy  — 
Agencies,  I,  87. 
Jefferson's  attitude,  I,  87. 
Plan  conceived  during  journey 

to  New  Orleans,  I,  98-99. 
Research,  unexplored  material, 

1,86. 
Treason  Trial  at  Richmond,  I, 

86. 

Wilkinson,  treason  of,  I,  55,  57. 

Butler,    Captain,    Shannon    and 

Chesapeake  incident,  I,  207. 

Butler,  General,  Civil  War,  II,  200- 

207,  211,  212,  213. 


Cabot,   Edward,    organization    of 
drill  club,  Civil  War,  II,  173. 
Cabot,  Elliot,  guest  of  M.  D.  Phil 
lips  at  dinner  party,  II,  341- 
342. 
Caesar,     Nolan's     expedition     in 

Texas,  I,  78,  79,  81. 
Cairo,  American  colony,  I,  62-63. 
Calhoun,  J.  C.,  Missouri  question, 

"  States  Rights,"  I,  242. 
Calvinism,  doom  of,  II,  270, 271, 272. 
Cambridge,  see  Harvard. 
Campbell,  James,  sailor  on  Consti 
tution,  lines  written  by,  I, 
204. 

Campbell,  Thomas,  editor  of  Eng 
lish   New    Monthly    Maga 
zine,  II,  331. 
Canal-boat  travelling,  in  1844,  II, 

365,369. 
Canals  — 
Champlain,  cost  and  success  of, 

I,  298. 

Chesapeake  and  Ohio,  I,  308. 
Earliest  American  works,  I,  299. 
Enthusiasm    and    early    enter 
prises,  I,  303-305. 
Erie  Canal  construction,  I,  295- 

298. 

Fulton  and  Gallatin  on  value  of 

canal  system,  1807, 1, 305-308. 

Importance  of  canal  system  of 

transportation,  I,  305-308. 
Middlesex    Canal   construction, 

charter,  etc.,  I,  299. 
Ohio  enterprises,  I,  304. 
Pennsylvania,  Alleghany  scheme, 

I,  305,  311-313. 

Rees's    Cyclopaedia    history,   I, 

296-297. 

Stowe,  Mrs.,  sketch,  I,  313-316. 
Susquehanna,  trip  on,  in  1844, 

II,  369. 

Canning,  George,  Monroe  Doctrine, 
1823,  I,  246. 

Cape  Cod,  boyhood  trip  to,  II,  304. 

Capital,  Federal,  position  in  South 
ern  and  Northern  territory, 
1,94. 


INDEX 


377 


Carlyle,  first  money  for  books  re 
ceived  from  Emerson,  II, 
236. 

Carter,  Robert,  joint  founder  with 
Lowell  of  the  Pioneer,  II, 
337. 

Cereal  foods  of  Massachusetts  in 
boyhood  of  Josiah  Quincy, 

I,  296. 

Century,  see  Eighteenth  and  Twen 
tieth. 

Champlaiu  Canal,  cost  and  success 
of,  I,  298. 

"Chancellor  Livingston,"  Robert 
R  Livingston  known  as,  I, 
24,  26. 

Channing,  W.  F.  — 
Journey  to  Schoharie  Cave,  II, 

347-348. 

Roman  cross  in  pine  tree  at 
Sharon,  N.Y.,  anecdote,  II, 
353. 

Channing,  Rev.  W.  H.,  Washing 
ton  party,  1863,  II,  198- 
19V). 

Chaplaincy  of  United  States  Sen 
ate,  Dr.  Hale's  election  to, 

II,  325. 

Chelmsford  water  dam,  building, 
salmon  anecdote,  I,  301- 
302. 

Chemical  match,  introduction  of, 
II,  96. 

Chesapeake,  surrender  to  Shan 
non,  1813,  I,  205-214. 

Chesapeake  and  Ohio  Canal,  ser 
vice,  etc.,  I,  308. 

Child,  Mrs.,  antislavery  book,  II, 
118. 

Childhood  reminiscences,  I,  264- 
273;  II,  302-310. 

China,  early  trade  with,  II,  94. 

Christian  Examiner,  Dr.  Hale's 
connection  with  tbe,  II,  343. 

Church,  E.,  account  of  experiment 
with  Fulton's  steamboat,  I, 
22. 

Cincinnati,  expedition  for  capture 
of  Orleans,  I,  65-67. 


Civil  War  — 

Appomattox  Valley,  surrender 
of  Lee,  II,  214-215. 

Battle  —  "  My  first  and  last  bat 
tle,"  II,  199-219. 

Bull  Run,  impressions  as  to  army 
after  defeat,  II,  178-182,  185 
(note). 

Butler,  General,  II,  200-207,  211, 
212,  213. 

Campaign,  story  of,  II,  171-219. 

Cannonade,  story  of,  II,  207-211. 

Church  assistance,  II,  178,  185- 
187,  200,  324. 

Despatch  bearer,  Dr.  E.  E.  Hale, 
II,  203-206. 

Kansas  soldiers,  proportion  of, 
II,  156,  323. 

Leaders  of  secession  policy,  vio 
lation  of  Missouri  Compro 
mise,  II,  130. 

Massachusetts  regiments,  march 
to  State  House,  1865,  anec 
dote,  II,  178. 

Personal  reminiscences,  II,  171- 
219. 

Salignac's  drill  club,  II,  173-176, 
324. 

Shiloh,  battle  of,  II,  185. 

Sumter  attack,  II,  172-176,  324. 

Trent  affair,  II,  190,  192. 

War  sermons,  II,  187. 

Writings  of  Dr.  E.  E.  Hale  dur 
ing  war,  II,  219. 

Clapp,    Eben,    Revolutionary   sol 
dier,  I,  142-143. 
Clay,  Henry  — 

Defeat  as  presidential  candidate, 
II,  64,  129,  150. 

Missouri  Compromise,  I,  243;  II, 
125. 

Northwestern  Territory,  treaty 
of  1814,  I,  316. 

Slavery  debate,  II,  123. 
Clermont,  steamboat,  voyage,  1807, 

I,  19,  29,  30. 

Clifford,  J.  H.,  story  of  Edward 
Everett's  speech  at  Williams 
College,  1837,  II,  14. 


378 


INDEX 


Clinton,  De  Witt,  Erie  Canal  con 
struction,  I,  295-298. 
Coasting   scene,    Boston,    Revolu 
tionary  anecdote,  I,  158. 
Coleridge,  lecture  on  Love,  I,  261- 

264. 
Colonization    Society,    formation, 

1817,  II,  123-124. 
Colored  people  — 
Colonization  Society,  formation, 

1817,  II,  123-124. 
Slavery,  see  that  title. 
Columbia  River,  discovery,  I,  18. 
Commerce  — 

Crisis  of  1837,  I,  278,  285,  287. 
Maritime    commerce,    see    that 

title. 
Monroe's  opinion,  1811,  I,  192, 

193. 

Progress,  I,  15,  18,  20 ;  II,  318. 
War  of  1812,  see  that  title. 
Compromise,  see  Missouri  compro 
mise. 
Concord  life  of  Emerson,  II,  236, 

239. 

Congregational  Council,  J.  Q. 
Adams  as  Moderator,  II, 
138. 

Conkling,  R.,  opinion  as  to  finest 
passage  in  modern  oratory, 
II,  4,  5. 
Constitution,  capture  of  Guerriere, 

I,  195-203. 
Conventions  — 
Baltimore  convention,  see  that 

title. 

National  conventions   for  elec 
tion  of  President,  I,  232,  278. 
Cooperstown,    N.Y.,   in   1844,   II, 

354-355. 
Corliss,    Henry,    Cut-off    patent, 

1830,  II,  91. 
Cornhill,  Boston,  to-day  and  1808, 

I,  123. 
Cotton  — 

Export  increase,  1801-1803, 1,  18 ; 

II,  318. 

Progress  of  American  commerce, 
1,15,18,20;  11,318. 


Cotton  —  Continued. 
Slave  labor,  profit  of,  II,  112, 

125. 

Whitney's  cotton-gin,  see  Whit 
ney,  Eli. 

Cowper,  lines  on  freedom  of  slaves 
in  England,  II,  107,  110. 

"Cry  of  the  Children,"  Miss  Bar 
rett's  (Mrs.  Browning's), 
first  publication  of,  II,  336. 

Curtis,  G.  T.,  omission  in  life  of 
Daniel  Webster,  I,  245;  II, 
121. 

Curtis,  G.  W.,  opinion  as  to  finest 
passage  in  modern  oratory, 
II,  3. 

Cut-off  patent,  Henry  Corliss,  1830, 
II,  91. 

Dacres,  Commodore  J.  R.  — 
Anecdotes  of,  I,  200-205. 
Capture  of  Guerriere  by  Consti 
tution,  I,  195-203. 
Daily  Advertiser,  Boston  — 
Hale  (Nathan),  as  editor,  I,  114, 
117, 118, 119, 129,  260,  261 ;  II, 
135,  164. 
Notice  of   Graham's  Magazine 

in,  II,  338. 
Dartmouth  — 

Emerson's  oration,  1838,  II,  3. 
Webster's  birthday  celebration, 

II,  237. 
Davis,   I.  P.,  Chelmsford  salmon 

anecdote,  I,  301-302. 
Davis,  M.,  life  of  Burr,  I,  97. 
Dawson,  Dr.  W.,  address  on  prog 
ress  of  nineteenth  century, 
II,  282-283. 

Dearborn,  Major-General  H.  S.  — 
Commander-in-Chief    of    U.    S. 

army,  War  of  1812,  1, 195. 
Wagon   introduced    from   west, 

I,  130. 
Decatur,  Stephen,  failure  of  cruise, 

1812,  I,  199. 
DeFoe,  Daniel  — 
North  Carolina  associations,  II, 
107  (note). 


INDEX 


379 


DeFoe,  Daniel  —  Continued. 
"Robinson  Crusoe"  and  slavery 
question,  II,  106. 

Democratic  government  in  United 
States,  I,  179-180,  217-219; 
II,  275. 

De  Nava,  Spanish  governor  of 
Louisiana,  passports  to 
Philip  Nolan,  I,  68,  74,  77. 

Derne  conquest,  General  Eaton's 
movement  to  restore  Hamet 
Caramelli,  I,  58-64. 

Derne  Street,  Boston,  conquest  of 
Derne,  I,  64. 

Detroit  surrender,  War  of  1812,  I, 
199. 

De  Verea,  P.  R.,  defence  of  Nolan 
expedition,  I,  80. 

Dickenson,  J.  D.,  Nathan  Hale 
tutor  to  children  of,  I,  105. 

Discoveries  and  changes   of   sev 
enty  years,  II,  91-99. 
Effect  of,  morally  and  spiritu 
ally,  II,  317-318. 

Distance  "  then  and  now,"  I,  230- 
233;  11,347-370. 

Dorchester,  Everett  House,  I,  252- 
253. 

"  Dot  and  Line  Alphabet "  article 
in  Atlantic  Monthly,  II,  342. 

Dutch  Republic,  Motley's  history, 
II,  79-80. 

Dyar,  Joseph,  description  of  Bun 
ker  Hill  battle,  I,  145. 

Eads's  ship-railway  scheme,  I,  305. 
Eaton,  General  W.  — 
Papers  and  memorial,  I,  62-64. 
Tripoli,    movement    to    restore 

Hamet  Caramelli,  I,  59-62. 
Editors,  early  American  magazine, 

II,  330-343. 
Education  — 
Harvard    University,    see    that 

title. 

Latin  School,  II,  309-310. 
Massachusetts,  see  that  title. 
Progress    in,    II,    225-226,    309- 
311. 


Education  —  Continued. 
Theological,  II,  311. 
Women's     education,     develop 
ment,  II,  95. 
Egypt,  American  colony  at  Cairo, 

I,  62-63. 

Eighteenth  century,  beginning  of 
Boston  celebration,  II,  289, 
294. 

Elections  — 

Kansas  territory,  arming  of  set 
tlers,  II,  165. 
President,  system  of  election,  I, 

232-233. 

Suffrage,  see  that  title. 
Eliot,   W.    H.,   plan   of    Tremont 

House  due  to,  II,  304. 
Emancipation,  Lincoln's  Compen 
sated     Emancipation     mes 
sage,  conversation  of  Charles 
Sumner,  II,  189-196. 
•''  Emancipator  "  —  John     Lowell, 

I,  113;    II,  109. 
Emerson,  G.  S.,  college  exhibition, 

II,  230-234. 
Emerson,  Ralph  Waldo  — 

Boston  lectures,  1833,  II,  230. 
Characteristics,  II,  235-237. 
Church    attendance,    board    of 

overseers    at    Harvard,    II, 

239-240. 

Dartmouth  oration,  1838,  II,  3. 
Extempore  speech,  opinion,   II, 

6. 
Guest  of  M.  D.  Phillips,  II,  341- 

342. 

Harvard  life,  II,  234. 
Kindness  to  young  authors,  II, 

253. 
Meeting  at    college    exhibition, 

II,  230-234. 
Money  first  received  for  books, 

II,  236. 
Stanley,  Dean,  sermons  heard  in 

America,  II,  238. 
Webster,   election   to  Congress, 

II,  121,  237. 
Writings,  influence  of,   II,  237- 

238. 


380 


INDEX 


Emigration  — 
Changes  wrought  in  America  by 

European,  II,  315. 
East  to  West,  II,  95,  314,  323. 
Irish,  II,  314-316. 
Kansas,  history  of  Emigrant  Aid 

Company,  II,  154-167. 
Marching  song   for   emigrants, 

II,  158-159. 
Massachusetts     Emigrant     Aid 

Company,  II,  154,  321-323. 
New    England     Emigrant    Aid 
Company,   II,   154-166,  322- 
323. 

Texas,  II,  312. 
Thayer's  plan,  II,  153-157. 
Works,    sawmills,    etc.,    estab 
lished,  II,  159. 
England,  see  Great  Britain. 
"Era  of  good  feeling,"  Monroe's 

administration,  I,  224-229. 
Erie   Canal  construction,  I,  295- 

298. 
"Europe,"    Alexander   Everett's, 

II,  228,  329-330. 

Evarts,   W.   M.,    emigration    en 
terprise,  II,  156. 
Everett,  Alexander  Hill  — 
Correspondence     with     J.      Q. 

Adams,  I,  259,  260. 
Diplomatic  work,  I,  117. 
England,  visit  to,  lectures  by 

Coleridge,  I,  261-264. 
Friend  of  Nathan  Hale,  I,  109, 

117. 
Owner  and  manager  of  North 

American  Review,  II,  332. 
Private  secretary  and  friend  of 
J.  Q.    Adams,  I,    117,    259, 
26p. 
Publication  of  book  in  Europe, 

II,  228. 

Van    Buren,  confidence    of   re 
election,  I,  287. 
Works  by,  II,  329. 
Youth,  I,  253-256. 
Everett,  Edward  — 
Admiration  of  English  authors, 
Burke,  etc.,  II,  7. 


Everett,  Edward  —  Continued. 
Article  by,  in  Miscellany  of  Liter 
ature  and  Fashion,  II,  336. 
Death,  II,  14. 

Editor  of  North  American  Re 
view,  11,332. 

Election  defeat,  1839,  II,  9. 
Exeter,  1806,  I,  111. 
Languages  of  Europe,  qualifica 
tions,  II,  11. 

Minister  to  London,  1841,  II,  11. 
Missouri  Compromise  violation, 

II,  130. 

Orations,  II,  12-23. 
Eloquence,  II,  23. 
Lafayette  address,  1834,  II,  22. 
Lexington  address,  1835,  II,  21. 
Preparation,  II,  12-14. 
Verbatim  addresses,  II,  16. 
Washington  oration,  effort  to 
reconcile      Northern      and 
Southern  people,  I,  167. 
Williams  College,  1837,  II,  14  ff. 
Webster,  Daniel,  intimacy  with, 

1,118-119;  II,  11. 
Worcester  jail  visit,  II,  11. 
Writing,  earliest,  I,  111. 
Youth,  I,  253-254. 
Everett  family  — 
Genealogy  and  history,  I,  249- 

256. 

Interest  of,  editorially,  in  Mis 
cellany  of   Literature    and 
Fashion,  II,  336. 
Everett    house,    Dorchester,    I, 

252-253. 

Everett,  John  — 
Ability  and  early  death,  I,  253. 
Military  funeral,  II,  307. 
Everett,  Oliver  — 
Publisher    of    North  American 

Review,  II,  330,  332. 
Reprint   by,    of   New    Monthly 

Magazine,  II,  331-332. 
Everett,  Rev.  Oliver,  history  of,  I, 

250-252. 
Everett,  Sarah  Preston  — 
Education,  etc.,  I,  254-256. 
Marriage,  I,  109,  256,  261. 


INDEX 


381 


Exeter  Academy,  Nathan  Hale  as 
mathematical  instructor,  I, 
108-111. 

Faneuil  Hall,  Boston  — 
Boston  life  in  1806,  I,  126. 
Building  and  uses,  I,  127. 
Everett,  Edward,  address  on  La 
fayette,  1834,  II,  22. 
Kansas  settlement,  meeting,  II, 

164. 
Play,  "  the  blockade  of  Boston," 

1776,  I,  155. 

Portrait  of  Isaac  Hull,  1, 198. 
Webster,   Daniel,   speech,   1841, 

11,38-40. 
Fero,  of  Nolan's  expedition,  I,  81, 

82. 
Fessenden,  John  M.,  T  rails  and 

flat  rails,  I,  310. 

Fessenden,   the   Misses,  of  Sand 
wich,  II,  304. 
Financial   crisis   of  1837,    I,    278, 

285,  287. 
Fiske,  John,  history  of  America, 

II,  87. 

Fitch's  steamboat,  1787,  I,  27. 
Fitz   Jordan,    Mr.,     Boston     Tea 

Party  notes,  I,  140. 
Florida  Purchase,  I,  221. 
Fly,  the,  Hale  brothers'  weekly 

journal,  II,  338. 
Forbes,  Captain  Robert  Bennett, 

II,  316. 
Fort    Monroe,    visit    to    General 

Butler,  II,  200-201. 
Fort  Plains,  N.Y.,  militia  train 
ing  at,  II,  356-358. 
Fort  Sumter,  attack  on,  II,  172- 

176,  324. 
Founders  —  the  Four  Founders,  I, 

16-18. 
France  — 
Louis  Philippe,   principle  of,   I, 

311. 
Louisiana    purchase,    see    that 

title. 

War  with  —  capture  of  Orleans 
planned,  I,  65-67. 


Franklin,  Benjamin  —  Statuary 
Hall,  Washington,  statue 
omitted  from,  II,  29-30. 

Writings,  early,  II,  248. 
Franklin    Medal,    Boston     Latin 

School,  II,  310. 
Friction   match,   introduction    of, 

II,  97. 

Fullum,     Abel,    childhood    remi 
niscences,  I,  266-270. 
Fulton,  Robert  — 

Canal  system,  value  of,  I,  307- 
308. 

Career,  I,  28. 

"Hall  of  Fame "  hero,  I,  33. 

Painter,  career  as,  I,  28. 

Panorama  in  Paris,  1794, 1,  28. 

Steamboat  invention,  I,  7,  12,  37. 

Engine  sunk  in  the  Seine,  Na 
poleon's  refusal  to  accept 
invention,  I,  23-26,  28. 

Livingston's  cooperation,  I,  12, 
24,  29,  37. 

Trial  sails  on  the  Seine,  success 
of,  I,  15,  21,  29. 

Universal  success  —  Hudson 
River  trips,  I,  26. 

Gallatin,  Albert  — 
Canal     communication    report, 

1807,  I,  305-308. 

Northwestern  Territory,  treaty 
of,  1814,  I,  316. 

Garrison,  slavery  abolitionist,  II, 
125,  128. 

Gayarre,  Charles,  discovery  of 
General  Wilkinson's  trea 
son,  I,  55-57,  99. 

Genty,  Abbe,  prize  essay  on  re 
sults  of  discovery  of  Amer 
ica,  I,  16,  20 ;  II,  287. 

Georgia,  Savannah  fire,  New 
York  relief  incident,  II,  121. 

Girard  will  contest,  Daniel  Web 
ster  as  counsel,  II,  37. 

Glenmary,  N.Y.,  N.  P.  Willis's 
home  at,  II,  367. 

Godey's  Lady's  Book,  first  ap 
pearance,  II,  334. 


382 


INDEX 


Goethe,  date  of  birth,  I,  251. 
Translation  from,  in  the  North 

American  Review,  II,  336. 
Gould,  Rev.  V.,  tutor  at  Williams 
College,  recruitingpupils,  1, 4. 
Government  — 
Democratic,  I,  179-180,  217-219; 

II,  275. 
"Era  of  good  feeling,"  I,  224- 

229. 

National  government,  insignifi 
cance,  1815,  I,  225-228. 
Presidents,  see  that  title. 
Graham,  George  Rex,  II,  334. 
Graham's  Magazine,  II,  334. 
Gray,    F.     C.,    translation    from 

Goethe  by,  II,  330. 
Gray,  Robert,  discovery  of  Colum 
bia  River,  I,  18,  126. 
Great  Britain  — 
Advice,  English,  unpalatable  in 

American  politics,  II,  112. 
Everett,    Edward,    minister    to 

London,  II,  11. 

Guerriere,  capture  by  Constitu 
tion,  1, 195-203. 
Napoleon's  expedition  against, 

I,  22-26. 

Revolution,  see  that  title. 
Shannon,    capture    of     Chesa 
peake,  I,  205-214. 
Slavery  introduced  into  England 

by  John  Hawkins,  II,  103. 
Van  Bureu,  mission  to  England, 

I,  284. 

War  of  1812,  see  that  title. 
Greek  study  for  college,  question 

of,  I,  106. 

Guerriere,  capture   by    Constitu 
tion,  I,  195-203. 

Habits,  contrast,  "  then  and  now/' 

1,40-45. 

Haldimand,  General,  Boston  coast 
ing  anecdote,  I,  158. 
Hale,  Charles  — 
American  colony  at  Cairo,  I,  63. 
Vaccine  incident,  Civil  Wrar,  II, 
176-177. 


Hale,  Enoch  — 
Birth,  date  of,  I,  251. 
Diary,  I,  5,  41,  45,  100,  101,  143- 

144,  179. 
Examination  of  Nathan  Hale  for 

Williams  College,  I,  4-6. 
Horseback  journeys,  I,  41. 
Simplicity  of  life,  I,  40-45. 
Hale,  Nathan  — 
Bangor,      chaise      drive      from 

Augusta,  I,  114,  117. 
Boston  career,  I,  111-118. 
Everett,  Alex.  H.,  friendship 

with,  I,  109, 117. 

Exeter    life,    mathematical    in 
structor,  I,  108-111. 
Journey  from  New  York  to  Troy, 

1804,  I,  30. 
Journey  from  Northampton    to 

Boston,  1806,  I,  291. 
Law  studies,  I,  111,  114. 
Marriage  with  Sarah  P.  Everett, 

I,  109,  256,  261. 
Newspaper  work,  1, 114, 117, 118, 

119,  260 ;  II,  164,  224,  330,  340. 
Power  presses  first  used  by,  in 

New  England,  II,  330-331. 
Railroad  system  in  New  England, 

founder,  1,309;  11,309. 
Troy  tutorship,  I,  105. 
Webster,  Daniel,  intimacy  with, 

II,  31,  33-35. 
Williams  College  — 

Commencement  —  "  progres 
sive  improvement  of  soci 
ety"  discussion,  I,  101-105. 

Examination  and  college  life, 

I,  4-11,  100-105. 

Historic  events  during  years 

at  college,  I,  7-21. 
Philotechnian  society  at   col 
lege,  I,  11. 
Wilson,  Henry,  introduction  to, 

II,  164. 

Hale,  Nathan,  Jr.,  editor  of  Miscel 
lany  of  Literature  and  Fash 
ion,  II,  335-336. 

Hale,  Robert  Beverly,  sonnet  on 
death  of  Parkman,  II,  86. 


INDEX 


383 


"Hall  of  Fame,"  New  York,  stat 
ues,  1,33;  II,  30. 

Hamet  Caramelli,  movement  to 
restore  to  crown  of  Tripoli, 
I,  59-62. 

Hamilton,  Alexander  — 
Appointment  as  commander  of 
army  under  Washington,  I, 
64. 
Orleans,  capture  of,  expedition, 

I,  65-67. 

Hamilton,  J.  A.,  offer  of  Presidency 
to  Andrew  Jackson,  I,  276. 
283. 

Hancock  Cushman  School,  Boston, 
English  taught  to  foreign 
pupils,  I,  107. 

Hancock,  John  — 
Middlesex  Canal  charter  signed, 

1793,  I,  299. 
Washington  story,  I,  165. 

Hargrave,  slavery  in  England,  epi 
gram,  II,  108,  110. 

Harrison  election,  1840,  I,  231-232, 
287 ;  II,  10. 

Harvard  University  — 
Alpha  Delta  Phi,  literary  society, 

II,  259. 

Arrival  of  E.  E.  Hale,  Samuel 
Longfellow,  and  others,  II, 
242,  310. 

Association  between  instructors 
and  the  undergraduates,  II, 
246. 

Chapel  attendance,  Emerson  on 
board  of  overseers,  II,  239- 
240. 

College  exhibitions,  II,  230-234. 

Divinity  School  lectures,  II,  311. 

Emerson's  life  at,  II,  234. 

Friendships  formed  at,  II,  310. 

Holmes,  college  life,  II,  256- 
260. 

Kirkland,  President, see  that  title. 

Literature,  chair  of,  II,  244. 

Longfellow,  Samuel,  acquaint 
ance  with,  II,  241-243. 

Longfellow,  professor  of  litera 
ture,  II,  241,  243-246. 


Harvard  University — Continued. 
Washington  Corps  anecdote,  I, 
222. 

Hawkins,  John,  invention  of  Eng 
lish  slave  trade,  II,  163. 

Hawley  Street,  Boston,  newspaper 
"  extra  "  anecdote,  I,  129. 

Heath- Washington  letters,  editing, 

I,  160. 

Hedge,  Dr.  F.  H.,  editor  of  Chris 
tian  Examiner,  II,  215,  343. 
Hendrick,  Caesar,  claim  for  free 
dom,  II,  108. 

Henshaw,  David,  and  slavery  abo 
lition,  story,  II,  115-118. 
Higginson,  sketch  as  historian,  II, 

86. 

Hildreth,  Richard,  history,  1, 68-70. 
Hill,    Alexander,     Revolutionary 

anecdote,  I,  154. 
Historians  — 

Causes  of  historical  study  and 
research  in  Boston,  II,  45-46. 
Massachusetts    Historical    Soci 
ety,  see  that  title. 
School  of  American  history,  II, 

229. 

[See  also  names  of  historians.'] 
Holland,  Motley's  history,  II,  79- 

80. 
Holmes,  Oliver  Wendell  — 

"  Autocrat    of    the    Breakfast- 
Table,"  II,   249,  333. 
Birthplace,Revolutionary  scenes, 

II,  247. 

Friendship  with  Lowell,  II,  249, 

253. 

Motley,  J.  L.,  life  of,  II,  79,  80. 
Kindness  to  young  authors,  II, 

253. 

Medical  profession,  II,  249. 
Phi  Beta  Kappa  poem,  II,  253. 
Pittsfield   poem,    1849,   II,  251- 

252. 

Writings,  II,  247-252. 
"Holy     Alliance"     intervention, 

Monroe  Doctrine,  I,  248-249. 
Howe's  Cave,  Schoharie,  N.Y.,  II, 

348,  351-352. 


384 


INDEX 


Hudson  River  — 
Clermont  voyage,   1807,    I,    19, 

29,30. 
Fulton's    steamboat,    universal 

success,  I,  26. 

Hull,  General,   surrender    at   De 
troit,  1812,  I,  199. 
Hull,  Isaac  — 
Anecdotes  of,  I,  200-205. 
Capture  of  Guerriere  by  Consti 
tution,  I,  195-203. 
Picture,    anecdote     of     Gilbert 

Stuart,  I,  204-205. 
"  Humorous  Account  of  an  Inva 
sion  of  Rose  Bugs,"  Edward 
Everett's,  II,  333. 
"Hurrah  for  Jackson!"  story,  I, 
271-273. 

Illinois,  admission  to  Union,  I,  238. 
Impressment  of  seamen,  I,  306. 
Improvement,    see    Internal    im 
provement. 

Indiana,  admission  to  Union,  1, 238. 
Indians,   early   trading    with,   II, 

94. 

Institutions,  state,  due  to  Dr.  Hale's 
Irish  Famine  publications, 
II,  320. 

Internal  improvement,  I,  291-318. 
Canals,  see  that  title. 
Railroads,  see  that  title. 
Washington's  comprehension  of 
future  development  of  coun 
try,  I,  293-294. 
Inventions  — 
Boys',  II,  307. 
Results  morally  and  spiritually 

from,  II,  317-318. 
Irish,  importation  of,  for  laborers, 

II,  315,  318. 

Irish  Famine,  the,  II,  314. 
Anecdotes  of,  II,  236,  316-317. 
State  institutions  due  to  publica 
tions  on,  II,  320. 
Irving,  Washington  — 
European  life,  II,  228. 
Madrid,  beginning  of  career  as 
historian,  II,  76. 


Irving,  Washington  —  Continued. 
Visit    and    introduction    to,   II, 
74-75. 

Jackson,  Andrew  — 
Administration,  I,  276-280,  282, 

285. 

Candidate    for    President,    sug 
gested    by  Aaron    Burr,    I, 

275-276. 

Etiquette  anecdotes,  I,  279-280. 
Financial  crisis  of  1837,  I,  278, 

285,  287. 
"Hurrah  for  Jackson!  "  I,  271- 

273. 
Nomination,  negotiations  of  J. 

A.  Hamilton,  I,  276,  283. 
Van  Buren,  mission  to  England 

and  presidency,  I,  284. 
James  vs.  Lechmere,  slavery  trial, 

1770,  II,  109. 
Jefferson,  Thomas  — 
Adams's  (Henry)  History,  1, 182- 

184. 
Burr,  Aaron,  acquaintance  with, 

I,  87,  88,  92,  C5-9J, 
Calendar  of  events,  2.,  'iS5. 
Criticism  by  Josiah  Quincy,  I, 

95. 

Derne,  General   Eaton's  move 
ments  to  restore  Hamet  Ca- 

ramelli  to  Tripoli,  I,  58-61. 
Fuss  and  folly  of  administration, 

1, 181. 

Humor  of  administration,  I,  58. 
Inauguration,  I,  51,  92,  101,  179. 
Louisiana  purchase,  attitude  to, 

I,  34,  184. 

Monroe  Doctrine,  I,  246-249. 
Nolan,  correspondence  with  and 

neglect  of,  I,  73,  83,  84,  87, 

185. 
Shipping  development,  attempt 

to  prevent,  I,  20. 
Slavery  attitude,  II,  99. 
Whitney's  cotton-gin  patent,  I, 

39,40;  11,318. 
Wilkinson  in  military  command, 

1,57. 


INDEX 


385 


Jenyns,  S.,  poem '  'America, "  II,  285. 
Jones,  Paul  — 
Slavery    abolition,   letter,   1786, 

II,  125-126. 
Victories,  II,  113. 

Journalistic  work  of  Dr.  Hale,  II, 
135-136,  152,  215-218,  336- 
338,  340,  342-343. 

Kansas  — 
Civil  war,  proportion  of  soldiers 

from  state,  II,  156,  323. 
Election,  first,  arming  of  settlers, 

II,  165. 
Missouri  atrocities,  II,  164,  165, 

322. 
Robinson,  Charles,  work  of,  II, 

166-167. 

Settlement,  history  of  Emigrant 
Aid  Company,  II,  154-167, 
321-323. 

Kansas-Nebraska    Bill,   repeal  of 
Missouri  compromise,  I,  244 ; 
II,  130,  153,  321. 
Keller,  Helen,  learning   to    read, 

etc.,  I,  267. 
Kentucky,  admission  to  Union,  I, 

238. 

Kirklaud,  President  of  Harvard  — 
Emerson  as  "  President's  Fresh 
man,"  II,  234. 
Washington  Corps  anecdote,  I, 

222. 

[See  also  Harvard.] 
Knickerbocker   Magazine,   begin 
ning  of,  II,  333. 

Knowledge,  progress  in,  II,  223, 
317-318. 

Lafayette  — 
Anecdote  told  to  Jared  Sparks, 

1828,  II,  52. 
Everett,  Edward,  address,  1834, 

II,  22. 

Obituary  of,  in  the  Fly,  II,  338. 
Recollections  of,  I,  137-138,  265; 

II,  302. 
Role  of    mayor  of    New    York 

assigned  to,  II,  302. 


Larcom,  Miss,  marching  song  for 

emigrants,  II,  158. 
Latin  School,  Boston  — 
Bliss,  W.  D.  and  A.,  step-sons  of 

George  Bancroft,  II,  57. 
Coasting,    Revolutionary    anec 
dote,  I,  158. 
Junior  mastership  at,   held    by 

Dr.  Hale,  II,  311. 
Studies  at,  II,  309-310. 
Washington,  story  of,  I,  164-165. 
Latin  study  for  college,  question 

of,  I,  106. 

Latrobe,  B.,  steam-engine  "  ma 
nia,"  I,  27. 

Lawrence,  Amos  A. — 
City  in  Kansas  named  for,  II, 

323. 
Interest  in  Salignac's  drill  club, 

II,  174. 

Lawrence,  Captain  James,  surren 
der  of  Chesapeake  to  Shan 
non,  1813,  I,  205-214. 
Lawrence  University,  Kansas,  II, 

322-323. 

Leaders,  Four  Founders,  indebted 
ness  of  United  States,  I, 
18. 

Lee,  General,  Washington's  anger 
at  Monmouth  retreat,  1, 169- 
170. 

Lexington,  Edward  Everett's  ad 
dress,  1835,  II,  21. 
Lexington,  Kentucky  — 
Nolan,  Philip,  life  in,  1,67. 
Origin  of  name,  I,  67. 
Liberator,  founding,  II,  120,  125. 
Liberia,  formation  of  Colonization 

Society,  1817,  II,  123-124. 
Libraries  of  Boston,  historical  col 
lections,  II,  45-46. 
Life,  habits  of,  "  then  and  now," 

I,  40-45. 
Limitations  and  Selections,  II,  276- 

279. 

Lincoln,  Abraham  — 
Compensated  Emancipation  mes 
sage,  conversation  of  Charles 
Sumuer,  II,  189-196. 


386 


INDEX 


Lincoln,  Abraham  —  Continued. 
Massachusetts     men,     appoint 
ments,  II,  78. 
Lincoln,  Gen.  B.,  Collector  of  Port, 

Boston,  1808,  I,  134. 
Lintot,    Fanny,     marriage     with 

Philip  Nolan,  I,  69,  74,  76. 
Literature  — 
Boyhood,  II,  307-309. 
Chair  of,  Harvard  College,  II, 

244. 
Change  and  progress  in,  II,  227- 

229. 
Longfellow,  H.  W.,  professor  at 

Harvard,  II,  241,  243-246. 
Sketch  of  Literature  of  hundred 

years,  experiment,  II,  277. 
[See  also  names  of  writers,  Emer 
son,  etc.  ] 

Liverpool  and  Manchester  railway, 
Stephen  son's  locomotive  in 
vention,  I,  309. 
Livingston,  R.  R  — 
"Chancellor  Livingston,"  I,  24, 

26. 

Greatness  of,  I,  24,  26,  35. 
Louisiana  purchase,  1, 18,  21,  24, 

33-35. 

Steamboat  navigation,  coopera 
tion  with  Fulton,  I,  12,  24, 
29,  37. 

Locomotive  invention  by  Stephen- 
son,  I,  308. 
Logan's    remark    on    Mississippi 

state,  1863,  II,  25. 
Longfellow,  Henry  Wadsworth  — 
Harvard  professorship,  II,  241, 

243-246. 
Kindness  to  young  authors,  II, 

253. 

Phillips  (M.  D.),  and,  II,  342. 
Longfellow,  Samuel,  acquaintance 

at  Harvard,  II,  241-243. 
Lothrop,  Dr.  Samuel  Kirkland,  II, 

311. 

Louis  Philippe,  principle  of,  I,  311. 
Louisiana  — 
Orleans,  see  that  title. 
Spanish  territory,  I,  67,  72. 


Louisiana  Purchase,  I,  7, 18,  19. 

Courage  of  Robert  Livingston,  I, 
18,  21,  24,  33-35. 

Discussion  and  fears  of  the  peo 
ple,  I,  35-37. 

Jefferson's  attitude,  I,  184. 

Missouri  Compromise,  see  that 
title. 

Williams  College  Philotechnian 
society  discussion,  I,  11,  12, 
101. 
Lowell  — 

Chelmsford  dam,  building,  1, 300. 

Sales  of  Miscellany  of  Literature 

and  Fashion  in,  II,  335. 
Lowell,  James  Russell  — 

Birthplace,  II,  253,  255. 

Boyhood,  II,  255. 

Characteristics,  II,  255-263. 

Connection    with    Atlantic,    II, 
342. 

Friendship  with  Holmes,  II,  249, 
253. 

Harvard  life,  II,  256-260. 

Intimacy  with,  II,  256,  259. 

Kindness  to  young  authors,  II, 
253. 

Law  studies,  II,  26. 

Mercantile  career,  story,  II,  26. 

Pioneer  magazine  started  by,  II, 
337. 

Work  in  Boston  Miscellany,  II, 

336-337. 
Lowell,  John  — 

Slavery  — 

Bill  of  Rights  of  Massachu 
setts,  freedom  passage,  II, 
108. 

' '  Emancipator,"  1, 113 ;  II,  109. 
Hendrick,  freedom  claim,  coun 
sel  in  case,  II,  108. 

Weekly     Messenger,     establish 
ment,   I,   111-113. 
Lowrie,  debate  on  slavery  aboli 
tion,  II,  123. 

McElroy,  W.,  Curtis's  opinion  as 
to  finest  passage  in  modern 
oratory,  II,  3. 


INDEX 


387 


McKiuley,   President,    opinion    of 

M.  Van  Buren,  I,  281-282. 
Mackintosh,    Sir   James,   passage 

from  Bombay,  I,  30. 
McMaster,  progress  of  autislavery 

sentimental,  114. 
Madison,  James  — 
Administration,  I,  186-191. 
Monroe  Doctrine,  I,  246-248. 
Secretary  of  State,  I,  187-189. 
Slaves,  alteration  of  will,  1, 169; 

II,  124. 

Tragedy,  I,  190-191. 
War  of  1812,  I,  189,  191. 
Magazines,   origins  of  American, 

II,  329-344. 
Mails,  contrast,  "then  and  now," 

1,44-45. 

"Man  Without  a  Country"- 
Nolan,  character,  I,  51-53,  70-71, 

76. 

Vallandigham  anecdote,  II,  217. 
Mauassas,  defeat  at,  impressions 
as  to  army,  II,  178-182,  185 
(note).    « 

Mansfield,  Lord,  decision  in  slav 
ery  trial,  1772,  II,  107- 
108. 

Manufactures  — 
Cotton,  see  that  title. 
Introduction  of  home  manufac 
ture,  II,  94-95. 
Marbois,    sale    of    Louisiana    to 

United   States,  I,  18,  34. 
Maritime  Commerce  — 

1790-1815,  progress,  I,  20;  1801, 

II,  93,  318-320. 

Mason   and  Dixon  line,  explana 
tion,  II,  122. 
Massachusetts  — 
Boston,  see  that  title. 
Cereal  foods  in  boyhood  of  Josiah 

Quincy,  I,  296. 

Civil  War  regiments,  march  to 
State  House,  1865,  anecdote, 
II,  178. 
Education  — 

Adams,  John,  opinion,  II,  268. 
Progress,  II,  225-226. 


Massachusetts —  Continued. 
Government     appointments    by 

Abraham  Lincoln,  II,  78. 
Messenger  and  Advertiser  news 
papers,  work  of  Nathan  Hale, 

I,  114,  117,  118,  119,  260,  261. 
Middlesex    Canal,   construction, 

charter,  etc.,  I,  299. 
Rum    manufacture,    I,    131-132; 

II,  115. 
Slavery  — 

Bill  of  rights,  freedom  passage, 

II,  109-110. 
General  Court  protest,  II,  104- 

105. 
James  vs.  Lechmere,  1770,  II, 

109. 

William  III,  charter,  II,  105, 109. 
Suffrage  limitations,  1780,  1, 274. 
Williams  College,  see  that  title. 
Massachusetts  Emigrant  Aid  Com 
pany,  II,  154,  321-323. 
Massachusetts  Historical  Society — 
Establishment    and    prosperity, 

II,   46. 
Washington  papers,   editing,  I, 

160. 

Match,  introduction  of  chemical 
and  friction  match,  II,  95- 
97. 

Mead,  E.  D.  — 

Celebration  of  beginning  of  twen 
tieth  century,  II,  290. 
Paper  on  the  Pioneer  magazine, 

II,  337. 
Melvill,  Major,  Boston  Tea  Party, 

I,  138,  140,  142. 

Melville,   Herman,    "Typee"   by, 

II,  309. 

Mendelssohn,  Abraham,  anecdote, 

I,  190. 
Merrick,  Senator,  vote  for  Texas 

annexation,  II,  151. 
Messenger,  see  Weekly  Messenger, 
"Meteor"  engine,  the,  II,  309. 
Mexico  — 
Conquest  anticipated  by  Philip 

Nolan,  I,  66. 
Texas  independence,  see  Texas. 


388 


INDEX 


Middlesex     Canal,     construction, 

charter,  etc.,  I,  299. 
Miles,  General,  powder  for  Spanish 

War,  I,  148  (note). 
Militia  training,  Fort  Plains,  II, 

356-358. 

Miner    family,    connection    with 
Philip  Nolan,  I,  69,  74-76,  82. 
Miranda,  General,  proposed  over 
throw  of  Spanish  rule,  I,  65, 
67. 

Miscellany  of  Literature  and 
Fashion,  publication  of,  II, 
334-337. 

"  Misery  Debate,"  II,  123. 
Mississippi  — 

Admission  to  Union,  I,  238. 
Logan's  remark,  1863,  II,  25. 
Louisiana  Purchase,  see  that  title. 
Missouri  atrocities,  Kansas  settle 
ment,  II,  164,  165. 
Missouri  Compromise,  I,  233-246. 
Admission  of  State,  1821,  I,  243, 

245. 
Bill,  Congressional  procedure,  I, 

241-244;  II,  113. 
Compromise  proposed,  I,  243. 
Congressional  debates,  II,  122- 

123. 
Feeling    of   protest   against,  I, 

245. 

"  States  Rights,"  I,  242. 
Violation  by  Nebraska  Bill,  I, 

244;  II,  130,  153,321. 
Webster's  opposition,  I,  244,  245 ; 

II,  41,  120. 

Molard,  refusal  of  Fulton's  steam 
boat,  I,  25. 

Monmouth  retreat,  Revolutionary 
War,  Washington's  anger, 
I,  169-170. 

Monroe  Doctrine,  President's  mes 
sage  and   project  of    J.   Q. 
Adams,  I,  246-249. 
Monroe,  James  — 
Administration,  I,  217-229,  234- 

236. 

Commerce,  opinion  of,  1811,  I, 
192-193. 


Monroe,  James  —  Continued. 
Election,  1820,  unanimous  vote, 

anecdote,  I,  228. 
"Era  of  good  feeling,"  I,  224- 

229. 

Florida  Purchase,  I,  221. 
Harvard,     Washington     Corps, 

anecdote,  I,  223. 
Journey,  1817,  I,  221. 
Missouri  Compromise,  see  that 

title. 

War  with  England,  I,  219. 
Monthly  Chronicle,  publication  of, 

11,340. 

Morison,  G.,  importance  of  canals 
in  transportation  system,  I, 
305. 

Morison,  Nathaniel  Holmes,  finan 
cial  call  on,  II,  370. 
Morris,   Gouverneur,    antagonism 
between   North  and   South, 
II,  99,  127. 

Motley,  John  Lothrop  — 
Bismarck,  acquaintance  with,  II, 

79.  :.    • 

Boston  reminiscence,  II,  81. 
English,  learning,  II,  77. 
Graduation    from   Harvard,   II, 

76. 
Guest  of  M.  D.  Phillips  at  dinner 

party,  II,  341-342. 
History  of  Dutch  Republic,  II, 

79-80. 
Secretary    of    Legation    at    St. 

Petersburg,   II,  77. 
Vienna,  appointment  and  retire 
ment,  II,  78-79. 

Mount  Vernon,  purchase  of,  1, 167. 
Mount     Washington,     Parkman's 

ascent,   journal,  II,   85. 
Mutton,  Revolutionary  anecdote, 
I,  154. 

Nachitoches,  journey  of  Philip 
Nolan,  I,  77. 

Napoleon  — 

Expedition  against  England,  re 
fusal  of  Fulton's  steamboat, 
I,  22-26. 


INDEX 


389 


Napoleon  —  Continued. 
Founder  —  share  in  creation  of 

America,  I,  16,  18. 
Louisiana,  sale  to  United  States, 

I,  7,  11,  19,  33. 

Scott's  (Sir  W.)  life  of,  II,  67. 
Natchez,  residence  of  Philip  Nolan, 

1,74. 

Navigation  of  American  waters  — 
Beginnings  of,  I,  18. 
Canals,  see  that  title. 
Fulton's    steamboat,    see    that 

title. 

Steam  navigation,  see  that  title. 
Nebraska  Bill,  repeal  of  Missouri 
Compromise,  I,  244;  II,  130, 
153,  320-322. 

Negroes,  see  Colored  people. 
Netherlands,  Motley's  history,  II, 

79-80. 

Newark,  N.J.,  Dr.  Male's  second 
sermon  preached  at,  II,  311- 
312. 
"  New  England  Boyhood,  A,"  Dr. 

Hale's,  II,  301-302,  307. 
New  England  Emigrant  Aid  Com 
pany,  history  of,  II,  154-166, 
322-323. 

New  England  Magazine  — 
Founding  of,  II,  333. 
Holmes's  writings,  II,   249-250, 

333. 
New  Haven,  Yale  College,  slavery 

discussion,  II,  111. 
New  Monthly  Magazine,  reprints 

of,  in  Boston,  II,  331-332. 
New  Orleans  — 
Purchase,  I,  34,  35. 
[See  also  Orleans.] 
Newport,   home  of    George    Ban 
croft,  II,  65. 
Newspapers  — 
Contrast,   "then   and  now,"  I, 

45 ;  II,  226. 
Daily  Advertiser,  Boston,  1, 114, 

117,  118,  119,  129,  260,  261. 
Hale,  Nathan,  work  as  editor,  I, 
114,   117,  118,   119,   260;    II, 
164,  224,  330. 


Newspapers  —  Continued. 
Press  comments,  insignificance, 

II,  21. 

Weekly  Messenger,  see  that  title. 
Newton     Theological     Seminary, 
attendance  on  lectures  at,  II, 
311. 

New  York  — 
"Hall  of  Fame,"  statues,  I,  33; 

II,  30. 

Journey  to  Troy,  1804,  I,  30. 
Politics   of   Aaron  Burr,  1795- 

1800,  I,  88,  91. 

Vacation  journey,   1840,    intro 
duction    to  Washington   Ir 
ving,  II,  73-74. 
Nolan,  Philip  — 
History,  1, 67-84. 
Horses    contracted    to    Spanish 
king,   story   of    journey,   I, 
72-84. 

Jefferson's  correspondence    and 
neglect,  I,  73,  83,  84,  87,  185. 
Killed  at  Waco  by  Spanish  offi 
cial,    I,    8,    51,    66,    78;    II, 
146. 

"Man  Without  a  Country,  "chai'- 
acter  in,  I,  51-53,  70-71, 
76. 

Marriage,  I,  69,  74. 
Mexico,  conquest  anticipated,  I, 

66. 

Natchez,  residence,  I,  74. 
Partner  with  James  Wilkinson, 

I,  51,  69-73. 
North  American  Review,  advent 

of,  II,  330. 

North  Carolina,   De  Foe  associa 
tions,  II,  107  (note). 
Northampton,  journey  to  Boston, 

1806,  I,  291. 

Northumberland,  Duke  of  (Lord 
Percy),  American  Revolu 
tion,  1,152-153;  II,  254. 
"  Northwest  Ordinance,"  1787,  ex 
emption  of  states  from  slav 
ery,  I,  238. 

Northwestern  Territory,  treaty  of 
1814,  I,  316. 


390 


INDEX 


Ohio  — 

Canal  enterprises,  I,  304,  308. 
Vallandigham  anecdote,  II,  217. 
"  Old     and     New,"     Washington 

studies,  I,  161. 
Old  and  New,  Dr.  Hale  editor  of, 

II,  343. 
Orators  — 

Finest  passages  of  modern  ora 
tory,  opinions,  II,  3-fj. 
[See  also  names,  Emerson,  etc.] 
Orban,   Baron,  learning  Latin  at 

school,  I,  107. 
"  Ordinance,"  1787,  exemption  of 

states  from  slavery,  I,  238. 
Orleans  — 

Burr's  journey  to,  I,  98-99. 
Capture,    planned,     war     with 

France,  I,  65-67. 
Horses  contracted  by  Nolan  to 
Spanish  king,  story  of  jour 
ney,  I,  72-84. 

Nolan,  Philip,  life  in,  I,  67-68. 
Spanish  territory,  I,  72. 
[See  also  New  Orleans.] 
Otis,  Harrison  Gray  — 
Dinner-basket  incident,  I,  126. 
Revolutionary  notes,  1, 156. 
Slavery  debate,  II,  123. 

Palfrey,  Dr.  John  G.  — 

Career,  II,  47-51. 

Causes  of  historical  study  and 
research  in  Boston,  II,  45- 
46. 

Slavery,  abolition  policy,  II,  48. 
Parker,   Theodore,   slavery  aboli 
tionist- 
Letter  to  E.  E.  Hale,  II,  117. 

Placard  cautioning  colored  peo 
ple  of  Boston,  1851,  II,  101. 
Parkman,  Francis  — 

Career,  II,  81-86. 

Death,  sonnet,  II,  86. 

English,  learning,  II,  77. 

Flowers,  lover  of,  II,  83. 

La  Platte,  correspondence  as  to 
wood  serviceable  to  emi 
grants,  II,  84. . 


Parkman  Francis  —  Continued. 
Mt.  Washington  ascent,  journal, 

II,  85. 
Pennsylvania,  canal  and  railroad 

enterprises,  I,  305,  311-313. 
Pepper  and  Ginger  — War  !  1, 191- 

214. 
Percy,  Earl,  American  Revolution, 

I,  152-153 ;  II,  254. 
Perkins,  Col.  T.  H.,  dinner-basket 

incident,  I,  126. 
Philadelphia  — 
Publication  of  magazines  at,  II, 

333-334. 
Twentieth     Century    Club,    II, 

281. 

Yellow    fever    outbreak,    1797, 
retirement  of  national  gov 
ernment  officers,  I,  226. 
Philipse,  Mary,  and  George  Wash 
ington,  1,  166. 

Phillips,  Moses  Dresser,  inaugura 
tion  of  Atlantic  Monthly  by, 

II,  340-342. 

Phillips  and  Sampson,  Boston  book 

publishers,  II,  340. 
Check  to  Emerson  for  "Repre 
sentative  Men,"  II,  236. 

Phillips-Exeter  Academy,  Nathan 
Hale  as  mathematical  in 
structor,  I,  108. 

Philotechnian  societies,  Williams 
College,  Louisiana  Purchase - 
discussion,  I,  11, 12,  110. 

Phosphorus  matches,  introduction, 
II,  96. 

Pierce,  Dr.  J.,  memory  of  history 
of  Oliver  Everett,  I,  250. 

Pierpont,  Rev.  John,  Tremont  The 
atre  prize  ode  by,  II,  306. 

Pike,  Z.,  interest  in  men  of  Nolan 
expedition,  I,  81-82. 

Pioneer  magazine,  the,  II,  337. 

Piracy,  slave  trade  condemned  as, 
II,  110-111. 

Pittsfield  poem,  Holmes,  1849,  II, 
251-252. 

Play,  "  Blockade  of  Boston,"  1776, 
I,  155. 


INDEX 


391 


Plumer,  William  — 
Monroe  Doctrine,  I,  250. 
Monroe's  unanimous  vote,  anec 
dote,  I,  228. 

Plymouth  Colony  District,  J.  Q. 
Adams  as  Representative, 
II,  136. 

Poets,  see  names,  Longfellow,  etc. 
Police  regulations  — 
South  Carolina,  1844,  II,  38. 
Webster,  Daniel,  on,  II,  37. 
Polk,  J.  K. — 
Election  as  President,  II,  63-64, 

145,  312. 

Intimacy  with  Bancroft,  II,  64. 
Population  increase,  1800-1900,  II, 

226. 

Prescott,  William  H.  — 
Blindness,  II,  69. 
"  Ferdinand  and  Isabella,"  work 

on,  II,  70. 

Reader,   Mr.  Hale  offered  posi 
tion,  11,69-71, 
Spanish  Legation  civilities,   II, 

71-72. 

Presidents  — 
Election,    system    of,     I,    232- 

233. 
Secretary  of  State  as  candidate, 

theory,  I,  234. 
Servant  of  the  American  people, 

I.  180. 

[See    also   names,  Washington, 

Jefferson,  etc.] 
"  President's  Progress,"  Monroe's 

journey,  1817, 1,221. 
Princeton,    battle    of,     American 

Revolution,  I,  148-149. 
Printing  presses  used  by  Nathan 

Hale,  II,  330-331. 
Progress  — 

Retrospect,  I,  32 ;  II,  267-276. 
Seventy  years,  II,  91-98. 
Slavery  as  drawback,  I,  31. 
Travelling,  II,  370. 
Public  Informer,  weekly  journal, 

II,  338. 

Putnam,  W.,  killed  at  Ball's  Bluff, 
II,  175-176. 


Quaker  repugnance  to  slavery,  II, 

100,  110,  112. 
Quincy,  Josiah  — 
Amanuensis,  Mr.  Hale  as,  II,  69. 
Prescott,  W.  H.,  Mr. Hale  offered 
position  as  reader,  II,  69,  70. 
Visit  in  country  home,  I,  93-95. 
Washington,   "shyness"    of,   I, 

173. 

Washington  story,  I,  165. 
Quiucy,  Josiah  (Jr.),  cereal  foods 
of  Massachusetts  in  boyhood, 
1,296. 

Railroads  — 

Boston  and  Worcester  railroad, 
see  that  title. 

Distance  then  and  distance  now, 
I,  230-233;  11,370. 

Eads's  ship  railway  scheme,  I, 
305. 

Hale,  Nathan,  founder  of  New 
England  system,  I,  309;  II, 
309. 

Locomotive  invention  by  Ste- 
phenson,  I,  308. 

Pennsylvania  enterprises,  I,  311- 
313. 

T  rails  and  flat  rails,  I,  310-311. 
Randolph,  John —Missouri    ques 
tion,  debate,  II,  123. 
Reading  — 

Boys'  choice  of,  IT,  307-309. 

First  lessons  in,  I,  267-268. 
Religion,  effect  on,  of  inventions 

and  discoveries,  II,  318. 
Religious  revolution,  II,  269-276. 
Review  of    progress,   II,   267-276, 

347-370. 
Revolution  — 

Bennington  victory  and  trophies, 
I,  150-151. 

Boston  Common  redoubts  and 
grass  circles  of  Revolution 
ary  times,  I,  152,  153. 

Boston  powder  house,  -visit  of 
General  AVashington,  I,  147. 

Boston,  Siege  of,  see  that  title. 

Boston  Tea  Party,  see  that  title. 


392 


INDEX 


Revolution  —  Continued. 
Bunker  Hill,  battle  of,  see  that 

title. 

Burgoyne's  surrender,  1, 143-144. 
Clapp,  Eben,  Revolutionary  sol 
dier,  I,  142-143. 
Coasting  scene,  interview  with 

Haldimand,  I,  158. 
Holmes,  Oliver  W.,  birthplace, 

Revolutionary  scenes,  II,  247. 
Monmouth  retreat,  Washington's 

anger,  I,  169-170. 
Mutton  anecdote,  I,  154. 
Percy,  Earl,  I,  152-153;  II,  254. 
Princeton,  battle  of,  1, 148-149. 
Ships,  timber  and  manning,  II,  93. 
Stark's  victory  and  trophies,  I, 

150-152. 
Traditional    anecdotes,    I,    135- 

159. 
Valley  Forge  encampment,  forest 

as  monument,  I,  155-156. 
Washington,  see  that  title. 
Revolutionary  men  in  Boston,  1808, 

I,  134. 

Revue  des  Deux  Mondes,  theory 
followed  by  the,  II,  343-344. 

Robinson,  Charles,  work  in  Kan 
sas,  II,  166-167. 

"  Robinson  Crusoe,"  slavery  ques 
tion,  II,  106. 

Rodgers,   Commodore,    failure    of 
cruise,  1812,  I,  199. 

Rosewelt  &  Co.,  steamboat  enter 
prise,  1811,  I,  317. 

Rum  manufacture    in    Massachu 
setts,  I,  131-132;  II,  115. 

Russia  — 
Adams  (J,  Q.),  minister,  I,  117, 

259,  260. 

Motley  as  United  States  Secre 
tary  of  Legation,  II,  77. 

St.  Louis,  settlement,  slavery  ques 
tion,  I,  239. 
"Salamander,"   the,  story  called, 

II,  336. 

Salcedo,  General,  action  as  to  No 
lan's  expedition,  I,  80-82. 


Salignac's  drill  club,  Civil  War, 

II,  173-176,  324. 
Salmon,   Chelmsford  anecdote,  I, 

301-302. 
Sampson,  Charles,  see  Phillips  and 

Sampson. 
Sandwich,  a  boyhood  visit  to,  II, 

304. 

San  Jacinto,  battle  of,  Texas  inde 
pendence,  II,  148. 
Sartain,  John,  II,  339. 
Sartain's    Magazine,    appearance 

of,  II,  339-340. 
Savannah  fire,  New  York   relief 

incident,  II,  121. 
Schoharie  Cave,  visit  to,  II,  348. 

351-352. 
Schooldays,  reminiscences,  I,  265- 

270 ;  II,  310. 
Scott,  Sir  W.,  "  Life  of  Napoleon," 

II,  67. 

Seamen,  impressment,  I,  306. 
Secession,  see  Civil  War. 
Sedgwick,  H.  D.,  newspaper  work, 

I,  114. 

Seine  River,  Fulton's  steamboat  — 

Sinking  of  engine,  I,  23-26,  28. 

Trial  trips,  I,  15,  21,  29. 
Selections  and  limitations,  II,  276- 

279. 

Sequoyah,  teaching  reading,  I,  267. 
Sermons  — 

First,  II,  311-314. 

Twentieth  century,  sermon  on, 

II,  281. 

War  sermons,  II,  187. 
Sewall,  Judge  — 
Celebration    of     beginning     of 
eighteenth  century,  Boston, 
memorandum,  II,  289,  294. 
Slavery  protest,  II,  105. 
Shakespeare,     dulness    of,     to    a 

youthful  Hale,  II,  307. 
Shannon,  surrender  of  Chesapeake 

to,  1813,  I,  205-214. 
Sharon,  N.Y.,  Roman  cross  in  pine 

tree  at,  II,  353. 
Sharp's  rifles  purchased  for  Kan 
sas  settlers,  II,  165. 


INDEX 


393 


Shiloh,  battle  of,  II,  185. 
Shipping,  see  Maritime  commerce. 
Ship-railway,  Mr.  Eads's  scheme, 

1,305. 
Ships  of  the    Revolution,  timber 

and  manning,  II,  93. 
Siege    of    Boston,    history,  tradi 
tional  anecdotes,  I,  135-159. 
Slavery  — 

Abolition  measures,  II,  99-131. 
Antislavery  sentiment,  growth 
of,  II,  109,  114,  122,  124,  127. 
Beginning  of  discussion  in  the 

North,  II,  120. 
Civil  War,  see  that  title. 
Indifference  as  to  importance 
of  solution   of  problem,   II, 
99-100. 

Adajms,  J.  Q.,  attitude,  II,  126. 
Child,  Mrs.,  autislavery  book,  II, 

118. 

Civil  War,  see  that  title. 
Clay,  defeat  as  President  candi 
date,  II,  129,  150. 
Cleavage  line  between  North  and 

South,  I,  93;  II,  99. 
Colonization  Society  formation, 

1817,  II,  123-124. 
Congressional  debates,  I,  241  ff . ; 

II,  113,  122-123. 
Cotton  advance,  profit  of  slave 

labor,  II,  112,  125. 
Cowper's  lines    on    freedom   of 
slaves  in  England,  II,  107, 
109. 
Drawback  on  American  progress, 

1801-1900,  I,  31. 
Emigration,  see  that  title. 
England,  introduction  of  slavery 

by  John  Hawkins,  II,  103. 
English  abolitionists,  advice  of, 

II,  112. 
General  Court  declarations,  II, 

103-105. 

Hargrave's  epigram,  II,  107-108. 
Hendrick,  Caesar,  case  of,  II,  108. 
Henshaw,  David,  story  of,  II, 

115-118. 
James  vs.  Lechmere,  II,  109. 


Slavery —  Continued. 

Jones,  Paul,  attitude,  1786,  II, 
125-126. 

Liberator,  founding,  II,  120,  125. 

Liberty  party  vote,  II,  129. 

Lincoln's  Compensated  Emanci 
pation  message,  conversation 
of  Charles  Sumner,  II,  189- 
196. 

Lowell,  John,  see  that  title. 

McMaster's  review  of  anti- 
slavery  sentiment,  II,  114. 

Madison,  James,  alteration  of 
will  as  to  freedom  of  slaves, 
I,  169;  II,  124-125. 

Mansfield's  (Lord)  decision, 
1772,  II,  107-108. 

Massachusetts,  see  that  title. 

Missouri  Compromise,  see  that 
title. 

Nebraska  Bill,  I,  244 ;  II,  130, 153. 

"  New  Ogs  "  and  "  Old  Ogs,"  II, 
129. 

Northern  policy  against,  1819,  I, 
244. 

"  Northwest   Ordinance,"   1787, 

I,  238. 

Parker,  Theodore,  see  that  title. 
Piracy,  slave  trade  condemned 

as,  II,  111. 
Placard  of  T.  Parker  to  colored 

people  of  Boston,   1851,  II, 

101. 

Principle  of  freedom,  II,  107. 
Quaker  opposition    to    slavery, 

II,  100,  110. 

"  Robinson  Crusoe,"  attitude  of, 

II,  106. 

Sewall,  Judge,  protest,  II,  105. 
Somersett  trial,  II,  107. 
South  Carolina  statute,  1823,  II, 

128. 
States,   admission  to  Union,  I, 

238. 

States'  Rights  doctrine,  I,  242. 
Texas  annexation,  II,  149-153. 
Thompson  addresses,  poster,  II, 

116. 
Virginian  sentiment,  II,  110, 125. 


394 


INDEX 


Slavery—  Continued. 
Washington  plantation,  liberty 

after  Martha  Washington's 

death,  I,  169. 
Walker,  Q.,  trial,  II,  109. 
Webster's  speech  and  policy,  I, 

244-245;  11,40,41,  121. 
Whitney,  Eli,  slavery  continued 

by  invention  of  cotton-gin, 

II,  111-112. 
William    III,  charter,  1690,  II, 

105,  109. 
Yale  College,  Linonian  Society 

debate,  1772,  II,  111. 
Smith,  General  W.  F.,  Civil  War, 

II,  213. 

Smith,  Sydney  — 
Epigram    regarding    American 

works,  II,  228,  332. 
Pennsylvania  Canal  enterprise, 

I,  305,  312. 

Smollett,  history  of  England,  II, 

67. 

Somersett,  slave,  trial,  II,  107. 
South  Carolina  — 
"Police  Regulation,"    1844,  II, 

38. 
Slaves,  imports  from  other  states 

prohibited,  1823,  II,  128. 
South     Congregational     Church, 
Boston,  pastorate  at,  II,  324. 
Southern    influence    in    National 
Administration,     1801-1861, 
1,92. 
Southern  Literary  Messenger,  the, 

11,334. 
Southwestern  hatred  of  Spain,  I, 

8,  65,  66,  84,  85,  99. 
Spiritual  revolution,  II,  269-276. 
Spain  — 
Hatred  of,  in  the  Southwest,  I, 

8,  65,  66,  84,  85,  99. 
Horses  contracted  by  Nolan  to 
Spanish  king,  story  of  jour 
ney,  I,  72-84. 

Irving,  Washington,    beginning 

of  career  as  historian,  II,  76. 

Legation  civilities  to  Dr.  Hale, 

II,  71-72. 


Spain  —  Continued. 
Nolan's  expedition,  see  Nolan, 

Philip. 
Orleans,  expedition  for  capture 

of,  I,  65-67. 

Prescott's  history,  II,  70. 
Texas  military  posts,  II,  146. 
Virginius  affair,  I,  85. 
Wilkinson,   General,   traitor  in 

pay  of  Spain,  I,  51-57,  99. 
Sparks,  Dr.  Jared  — 
Authors,  advice  to,  II,  54. 
Career,  II,  51-55. 
Life  of  Washington,  I,  160,  162; 

II,  52. 
Manuscripts  at  Cambridge,  II, 

54. 
Princeton   battle,    story   of,    I, 

148. 

Sprague,  Charles  — 
Father  of  — Boston  Tea  Party, 

I,  140. 

Fourth  of  July  oration,  passage, 

II,  4-6. 

Stables,  Boston,  of  1808,   I,  127- 

129. 

Stanley,      Dean  —  Emerson      ser 
mons,  II,  238. 
Stark,  John,  Revolutionary  victory 

and  trophies,  I,  150-152. 
State  House,  Boston,   laying  cor 
ner-stone  of  annex,  I,  133. 
States,  admission  to  Union,  ques 
tion  of  slavery,  I,  238. 
[See  also  names  of  States.] 
States'  Rights  doctrine,  I,  224,  242. 
Statuary  Hall,  Washington,  stat 
ues,  II,  29-30. 
Steamboat  navigation  — 
Clermont    steamboat,     voyage, 

1807,  I,  19,  29,  30. 
Fitch's  steamboat,  1787,  I,  27. 
Fulton's  steamboat,  see  that  title. 
Item    in    history    of    American 

progress,  I,  20. 
List  of  users  of  steam  on  boats, 

1785-1794,  I,  27. 

Livingston,     cooperation     with 
Fulton,  I,  12,  24,  29,  37, 


INDEX 


395 


Steamboat    navigation  —  Contin 
ued. 
Mania,    paper   of   B.    Latrobe, 

1803,  I,  27. 

Travelling  in  1811,  1814,  I,  230. 
Weekly    Messenger,    announce 
ment,  1811,  I,  317. 
Steam  railroads,  see  Railroads. 
Stephenson,    George,    locomotive 

invention,  I,  308. 
Story,  William,  II,  336. 
Stowe,  Mrs.,  canal  sketch,  I,  313. 
Suffrage  — 

Limitations,  1780,  1798,  I,  274. 
Universal    suffrage,  beginnings 

of,  II,  273. 
Sumner,  Charles  — 
Brooks's  assault,  II,  163-164. 
Kansas  emigration,  letters,  II, 

160. 

Lincoln's  appointment  of  Massa 
chusetts  men,  story,  II,  78. 
Lincoln's  Compensated  Emanci 
pation    message,    conversa 
tion,  1862,  II,  189-196. 
Unpopularity,  II,  196. 
Sumter,  Fort,  attack  on,  II,  172- 

176,  324. 
Susquehanna    Canal,    travel    via 

the,  in  1844,  II,  369. 
Symonds,     J.     A.,     reference    to 

biography  by,  II,  301. 
Syracuse  as    a  watch-key  centre 
for  Dr.  Hale,  II,  364. 

Tarry  town,  visit   to   Washington 

Irving,  II,  74-75. 
Tayloe,  O.,  visits  of  Van  Buren, 

anecdote,  I,  286. 

Tea  Party,  see  Boston  Tea  Party. 
Tehauntepec,  Eads's  ship-railway 

scheme,  I,  305. 
Tennessee,  admission  to  Union,  I, 

238. 
Texas  — 

Annexation,  II,  149-153,  312. 
Burr's  conspiracy,  see  that  title. 
Description    written    by    Philip 
Nolan,  I,  74. 


Texas —  Continued. 
Independence,  II,  147-149. 
Alamo  massacre,  II,  148. 
San    Jacinto,    battle    of,    II, 

148. 

Nolan,  Philip,  see  that  title. 
Physical  features,  II,  145-146. 
Spanish  control,  Colonial  office, 

I,  74,  83. 

Spanish  military  posts,  II,  146. 

Thacher,  Dr.,  account  of  revolu 
tionary  scenes,  I,  134. 

Thayer,  Eli,  organization  of  Emi 
grant  Aid  Company,  II, 
153-157,  321-322. 

Thompson,  George,  slavery  abo 
litionist,  poster,  II,  116. 

Ticknor,  George,  chair  of  litera 
ture  at  Harvard,  II,  244. 

Toll  anecdote,  I,  43. 

Trade,  see  Commerce. 

T  rails  and  flat  rails,  I,  310-311. 

Travelling  — 
Boston  to  Washington,  in  1844, 

II,  347-370. 

Cape  Cod  trip,  II,  304. 
Distance   "then  and    now,"    I, 

230-233 ;  II,  347-370. 
New    York    to    Troy,    journey, 

1804,  I,  30. 

Northampton    to  Boston,   jour 
ney,  1806, 1,  291. 
Railroads,  see  that  title. 
Steam  navigation,  see  that  title. 
"Then  and  now,"  II,  370. 
Tread  well,  Daniel,  power  presses 

invented  by,  II,  331 . 
Treaty  with  Pasha  of  Tripoli,  I, 

62,  64. 

Tremont  House,  laying  of  corner 
stone  of,  II,  304. 

Tremont  Theatre  (first),  ode  at 
first  performance  at,  II,  305- 
306. 

Trent  affair,  II,  190,  192. 
Trenton  Falls,   N.Y.,  visit   to,  in 

1844,  II,  348,  358-363. 
Tripolitan  war,  treaty  with  Pasha, 
1,58-64. 


396 


INDEX 


Troy- 

Hale,  Nathan,  as  tutor,  I,  105. 
Journey  to  New  York,  1804,  I, 

30. 

Tuckerman,  H.  W.,  editor  of  Mis 
cellany   of  Literature    and 
Fashion,  II,  337. 
Turnpike  anecdote,  I,  43. 
Twentieth  century  — 
Beginning   of  —  Boston  celebra 
tion,  II,  290-296. 
Dawson,    Dr.  W.,    address,    II, 

282-283. 
Discussion  as  to  time  of  ending, 

II,  280. 
Washington    sermon,    1885,    II, 

281. 
Twentieth  century  clubs,  II,  280- 

281. 
Mead,  E.  D.,  president  of  Boston 

club,  II,  290. 
Tyler,  John  — 
Cabinet,    "Corporal's    guard," 

II,  143. 

Presidency,  II,  143. 
Texas  independence  and  annexa 
tion,  II,  145,  149,  151. 
"Typee,"  Melville's,  juvenile  pe 
rusal  of,  II,  309. 

Underwood,      Francis,      Atlantic 

Monthly  connection,  II,  342. 
United  States  — 
Adams's   history,    1800-1817,   I, 

182-184. 
Events,  see  their  titles,  Civil  War, 

Louisiana  Purchase,  etc. 
Four  Founders,  I,  16-18. 
Government,  see  that  title. 
Presidents,  see  that  title. 
Progress,  see  that  title. 
Prosperity   due   to    four    great 

steps,  I,  31. 
Southern  influence  in    national 

administration,  1801-1861,  I, 

92. 
Territory,    acquisition,     I,     32, 

34. 
Virginian  Dynasty,  see  that  title. 


Universal  suffrage,  beginnings  of 

II,  273. 
University,  see  Harvard. 

Vacation,  1840,  II,  73. 
Vallandigham,     Ohio     politicians 

story  of,  II,  217, 

Valley  Forge,  Revolutionary  en 
campment,  forest  as  monu 
ment,  I,  155-156. 
Van  Buren,  Martin  — 
Administration,  I,  284-288. 
Bancroft  appointed  Collector  of 

Customs,  II,  56. 
Commercial  crisis  of  1837, 1,  2785 

285,  287. 
Indignation   and    bitterness   of 

the  people,  I,  278,  285-287. 
McKinley's  opinion,  I,  281-282. 
Mission  to  England,  I,  284. 
Nomination  and  retirement,  I, 

284-287. 
Reelection,   confidence    of   Van 

Buren,  I,  287. 
Tayloe,  O.,  visits  to  house  of, 

anecdote,  I,  286. 
Verea,  P.  R.  de,  defence  of  Nolan 

expedition,  I,  80. 
Virginia  — 

Antislavery  sentiment,  II,  110. 
Civil  War  —  "  My  first  and  last 

battle,"  II,  204-211. 
Slavery,  David  Henshaw,  anec 
dote,  II,  115-118. 
Slavery  sentiment,  II,  110,  124- 

125. 

Washington,  George  — 
Citizenship,  I,  168. 
Presidential  third  term  vote, 

I,  168. 

Virginian  estimate.  I,  170. 
Virginian  Dynasty,  1801-1817  — 
Adams's  (Henry)  history,  1, 182- 

184. 

Calendar  of  dates,  I,  185. 
Jefferson,  see  that  title. 
Madison,  see  that  title. 
Virginius  affair,  1870,  I,  85. 
Voting,  see  Suffrage. 


INDEX 


397 


Waco,  death  of  Philip  Nolan,  I,  8, 

51,  66,  78. 
Wagon    introduced     by    General 

Dearborn,  I,  130. 

Walker,  Dr.  J.,  advantage  of  re 
peating  eld  sermon  in  pulpit, 
11,8. 

Walker,  Q.,  slave,  trial,  II,  109. 
War  of  1812  — 

Chesapeake,  surrender  to  Shan 
non,  1813,  I,  205-214. 

Constitution,  capture  of  Guer- 
riere,  I,  195-204. 

Declaration  of  war,  I,  194,  195. 

Hull,  General,  surrender  at  De 
troit,  I,  199. 

Hull,  Isaac,  see  that  title. 

Madison,  administration  of,  I, 
189,  191. 

Orders  in  Council  suspended  by 

British  government,  I,  194. 
Warren  Street  Chapel,  Dr.  Hale's 
first  sermon  preached  at,  II, 
311. 
Washington,  D.C.  — 

Dinner  party,  1863,  II,  197. 

First  visit  of  Dr.  Hale,  hospi 
tality,  II,  139-141. 

Journey  from  Boston  to,  in  1844. 
II,  347-370. 

Ministry  of  Dr.  Hale,  II,  142,  281, 
312! 

Statuary  Hall  statues,  II,  29. 
Washington,  George  — 

Anecdotes  as  to  Dr.  Hale's  like 
ness  to  and  acquaintance 
with,  I,  3,  159. 

Autograph  anecdote,  1, 174-175. 

Boston,  entry  into,  I,  162,  164, 
173. 

Cambridge  Powder-house,  visit 
to,  I,  147. 

Citizenship  of,  I,  168. 

Comprehension  of  future  de 
velopment  of  country  8  1, 293- 
295. 

Demigod  theory,  I,  160,  174,, 

Diary,  1746,  lost  manuscript,  I, 
162. 


Washington,  George  —  Continued. 
Everett  orations,  I,  167-168. 
Hand,  largeness  of,  I,  169. 
Heath- Washington  letters,  edit 
ing,  I,  160. 
Monmouth  retreat,  anger  with 

General  Lee,  I,  169-170. 
Mount  Vernou  purchase,  I,  167. 
"Old    and    New"    studies,    I, 

161. 

Philipse,  Mary,  I,  166. 
Presidential  third  term,  Virginia 

vote,  I,  168. 

Princeton,  battle  of,  I,  148-149. 
Reminiscences,  I,  160-175. 
Eevolution,  see  that  title. 
"  Shyness,"      Josiah      Quincy's 

opinion,  I,  173. 
Slaves,    liberty    secured    after 

Martha  Washington's  death, 

I,  169. 
Sparks's  "  Life  of  Washington," 

I,  160,  162  ;  II,  52. 
"Virginia,  see  that  title. 
"  AVashington's  progress,"  1791,  I, 

221. 
Waverley  Novels  and  the  young 

Hales,  II,  308. 
Webster,  Daniel  — 
Albany  residence  considered,  II, 

31-32. 

Boston  career,  I,  118;  II,  31. 
Dartmouth  celebration  of  birth 
day,  II,  237. 

Eloquence,  opinion  on,  II,  29. 
Emerson  on  Webster's  election 

to  Congress,  II,  121,  237. 
Everett,  Edward,  intimacy  with, 

I,  118-119;  II,  11. 

Girard  will  contest,  counsel  for, 

II,  37. 

Habits,  told  by  G.  J.  Abbot,  II, 
36. 

Hale  family,  intimacy  with,  II, 
31,  33-35,  36-37. 

Impression  on  intelligent  people, 
II,  26. 

Intoxicants,  denial  of  public  im 
pressions,  II,  42. 


398 


INDEX 


Webster,  Daniel — Continued. 
Kindness  to  children,  incidents, 

II,  34-35. 
Missouri  Compromise,  opposition 

to,  I,  243,  245;  11,41,  120. 
New   Hampshire  house  burned 

down,  II,  31. 

North  and  South,  breach  inevi 
table,  II,  40. 
Orations  — 
Anecdote  of  Edward  Webster, 

II,  34-35. 
Faneuil  Hall  speech,  1841,  II, 

38-40. 

Supreme  Court  speeches,  II,  37. 
Secretary  of  State,  II,  10,  35. 
Shooting  ancedote,  II,  33. 
Statue  in  Statuary  Hall,  Wash 
ington,  II,  29-30. 
Visit  to  Washington,    1844,  II, 

35. 

Webster,  Edward  — 
Anecdote,  Daniel  Webster's  ora 
tion,  II,  34-35. 
Intimacy  with,   II,   33,   34,  140- 

141. 

Weeden,  William,  remark  concern 
ing  Old  and  New,  II,  343. 
Weekly  Messenger  — 
Establishment    and    politics,    I, 

113,  117,  118,  119,  260,  261. 
Steamboat  announcement,  1811, 

I,  317. 
Whitney,  Eli  — 

Cotton-gin  invention,  I,  7, 12,  37 ; 

II,  94,  318. 

"  Hall  of  Fame  "  statue,  I,  33. 

Item    in    history   of    American 
progress,  I,  20. 

Patent,  I,  19,  39. 

Slavery  continuance  by  cotton- 
gin  invention,  II,  111-112. 

Story  of  invention,  I,  38-89. 
Whitney,  J.  E.,    Jr.,  note   as   to 
history    of    Chesapeake,    I, 
213. 

Whitney,  Miss   Susan,  schoolday 
reminiscences,  I,  265-270. 


Whittier,  marching  song  for  emi 
grants,  II,  159. 
Wilkinson,  Gen.  James  — 

Burr  conspiracy,  connection  and 
betrayal,  I,  55-57,  98-100. 

"  Memoirs,"  I,  53,  55,  70,  71. 

Orleans,  plan  for  capture  of,  I, 
65-67. 

Papers,  history  of,  I,  57-58. 

Partner  with  Philip  Nolan,  I,  51, 
69-73. 

Revolutionary  services,  I,  54. 

Traitor  in  pay  of  Spanish  king, 

I,  51-57,  99. 

William  III,  Massachusetts  liberty 

charter,  1690,  II,  105,  109. 
Williams  College  — 
Everett,  Edward,  oration,  1837, 

II,  21-23. 

Foundation  and  charter,  I,  4. 
Gould,  tutor,  recruiting  pupils, 

1,4. 

Hale,  Nathan,  see  that  title. 
Philotechnian    societies,  discus 
sion  on  Louisiana  Purchase, 
1, 11,  12,  110. 

Willis,  Nathaniel  P.,  II,  336. 
Home  of,  at  Glenmary,  II,  367. 

Wilson,  H.,  introduction  to  Nathan 
Hale,  II,  164. 

Women,  education,  development, 
II,  95. 

Woodhull,  Dr.  A.  A.,  note  as  to 
bridge  destroyed  at  Prince 
ton,  I,  149  (note). 

Worcester,  Dr.  Bale's  pastorate 
at,  II,  312-314. 

Worcester  jail,  visit  of  Edward 
Everett,  II,  11. 

Writers,  see  Authors. 

Yale  College,  slavery  discussion  by 
Linonian  Society,  II,  111. 

Yellow  fever,  Philadelphia,  1797, 
retirement  of  national  gov 
ernment  officers,  I,  226. 

"Yoakum's  History  of  Texas," 
story  of  Philip  Nolan,  I,  78. 


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